Tips for blog beginners

Here is some tips or advices for blog beginners.

1) Settings -> Comment -> Who can comment.

My advice: Tick 'Anyone' radio button.
Reasoning:
If you are a beginner, you would like to receive more and more comments. You would love to get comments from anyone. Google search or say Google blog search may lead anyone to land onto your page if your blog contents are good enough. In this case, if some one comes across your blog by any means and if he wants to comment on it, he will be able to do that only if you have kept this option enable. Person will be able to comment on your blog even if he does not have (or want) Google account or Open ID account.
My Experience:
When I had created my blog, I had just sent a link of it to my some of the friends. My friends were also new to blog. They visited a blog and tried to comment on it. But did not succedded. Reason was by default blogger was asking for Google username and password to comment. Everyone is very busy now a days and so no one will care to enter username and password just to put a comment on your blog.

So at least initially I would advice to make this commenting open to everyone. Later on, you can always change this option.

2) Setting -> Comment -> Enable Comment Moderation

My advice: Enable.
Reasoning :
If you are a new blogger, you would love to receive comments from everyone but you will also like to have control over which comments. You would also like to accept and reject comments based on your choice. For example, You create a blog and write down your thinking, your philosophy, your own unique thoughts. Many of your friends or readers may not like (or say hates) this kind of blogs. So they will just come to your blog and post anything and everything. So as to take care that any kind of comments are not been posted on your blog, you will require to keep this setting on. Other advantage is, if you enable this setting you can reject some suspicious spam like comments.
My experience:
When I had created a blog I had not kept this feature on. So what happened one day was, I had posted a blog on something. One of my friend has posted a comment which I did not like. I was not aware of that someone has commented bad things on my blog. Till the time I came to delete this comment, some of my other friends read that blog and comments. Which I had not intended. If I had kept moderation on, I could have just rejected comment. So catch here is, always keep comment moderation on.

Disadvantage with this is, you will require to check your mails regularly and accept comments. But as being a beginner you will not be getting too many comments. So it is okay to keep this on.

3) Setting -> Comment -> Show word verification for comments?

My advice: No. Do not enable this.
Reasoning :
It discourages readers from posting a comment. Before posting a comment, reader will be asked to enter word like 'sdjhbf73n'. Which is quite time consuming and it also requires person's attention. As mentioned earlier no one has free time. People may like you blog and would like to comment on it only if comment posting is easy and fast. If you enable this word verification, it will make comment posting difficult and slow. I guess, by default this is kept on.

If you are beginner, do not enable this. If you are matured blogger who has dedicated and retruning readers, you can make it on.

4) Setting -> Comment -> Comment notification email

This can be made on, if you are not moderating a comments. If you are moderating a comment and also keep this on, probably you will get 2 mails for one comment. Initially I had, by mistake, kept both these options of comment moderation and comment notification enabled. So you will get one email where you can accept or reject a comment. If you accept it, comment will be posted and so you will get one more email because of comment notification.

If you are not comfortable enough in moderating a comment, I mean if you are not checking your mails regularly, you can make moderation off and keep this comment notification on. By keeping this on you will come to know how many comments had been made & who and all have made a comments.

5) Setting -> site feed -> Allow blog feeds

My advice: Make full.
Reasoning:
Most of the people use RSS readers to read blogs.
If you keep this option to none, your readers will not be able to read your blogs from RSS reader. They will even not come to know, when you have posted new blog.
If you keep this option to less, only first 256 chracters will be visible via RSS reader. So your readers will come to know that you have posted something new, but they will not be able to read full blog from RSS reader.

So if you are beginner, keep this to full so that your reader can read your blogs from RSS reader as soon as you post something new.

Note: For beginners RSS reader concept may look like a rocket science. But it is not. Just go on Google reader and you will come to know how easy is that to start using RSS reader.



6) Setting -> email -> blogsend address

Here I would advice to give your email address. With this, you will get an email whenever you posts new blog. This will be helpful if you want to forward your blog to someone else. Instead of sending blog link, you can simply forward an email to your friend. In other way you will also have good collection of your blogs in your inbox! And anyhow right now, space is not an issue for any email users be it gmail, Yahoo, Rediff. Other way is, you can put mail address of your friend over here. Once you put email address of your friend, your friend will get an email to confirm that he is agreeing to get your blogs on an email . After confirming this, your friend will automatically get your blog in an email whenever you post some new thing!!


With this, let me also put my worries over here. I do not know how to do following things. Can anyone help me?
1) How can I get label cloud? Any HTML code for that? (I know how to put label list. I want label cloud)
2) How can I do underlining, strike through and put smileys in blog?
3) How can I add top 5 commented blogs?