I am tired of being technology-ignorant. I am not even talking about complicated programming. I do not even have knowledge of HTML, I just about know some basic tags for bold, italic, paragraph, list…that’s it.
Now I have never aspired to learn such technical things before, but it is causing me few problems in blogging and web-surfing.
My tag cloud from wordpress does not show all the tags I have in my post. Other day Ramesh pointed out that he was not able to click the Pakistan tag in the tag cloud on this page. I had no clue how to correct it. I got rid of it.
I have no idea how I can make StumbleUpon work for me. I have seen people using it. Ashish has a column called “My stumbles” in his blog. I use del.icio.us, why do I need stumble?
Other day Ish posted an entry titled “Social Bookmarks for WordPress.com Users.” I downloaded the files he provided at the end of this post. Though I thought understood how it works after reading his post, later I didn’t know how to use the files he provided. Those files are still lying unused in my laptop.
Not only this, I like to list the categories/tags on the right hand panel of my blog. I could not seem to find an option for this in the last theme. Or is it just me, other day I realized it took me entire month to remove the restriction that allowed only wordpress members to comment in my blog.
I do not how RSS feed works. I have tried to read about it, somehow I don’t know how to subscribe to it. Recently, it has been easier to subscribe since I started using Google reader.
This video from Common Craft helped me understand the underlying concepts of RSS.
RSS in Plain English
But I still do not know if anyone can subscribe RSS feed for my blog or how to manage RSS feed for my blog? Do I need to do something about it?
We can now include scripts in wordpress, how? I do not know practically how to use it for my benefit. Most people include “Digg it” logo on their post, thought I want to, I can not due to my ignorance. Some bloggers include colorful text boxes to present quoted text. Me? I have no idea how to do it.
Now, there is so much hoopla about Web 2.0. What is it? I do not even want to google and read technical nitty-gritties. There is something in me that simply refuses to dwell into technical nitty gritty unless explained with creatively as done by Common Craft. May I find a way to deal with this.
Visceral Observations 
Btw, I had two more queries that I did not mention in my post:
1) How to take a back up of wordpress blog? In case, wordpress makes untimely suspension of my blog or something like that?
2) How can I define a default font for all my blog posts?
Any help with this is appreciated.
have you tried google reader? google.com/reader this is an excellent tool to get hold of your blogging activity real quick
Yes, dinsan I use google reader. See this is what I have written: 🙂
“I do not how RSS feed works. I have tried to read about it, somehow I don’t know how to subscribe to it. Recently, it has been easier to subscribe since I started using Google reader.“
hey poonam,
RSS is really simple .. go to your_blog_url/feeds ..
pooff.. that is your blogs feed.. you can burn feeds to keep trac of them with feed burner..
about social bookmarking .. its working for now .. if you bookmark your post at social bookmarking .. your results will have many external links with your choice of keywords. which will increase your rank in search engines .. but now google has provided social bookmarking websites guideline to provide nofollow links for bookmarked pages .. else google wont crawl them..
to add all categories to tag cloud use tag cloud widget and set maximum tags to very large number .. simple
Okay, you don’t need to be worried because you’re not that into technology. There are many like that. I’ll talk about the questions you asked and give the answers to the ones I know.
Now since you have del.icio.us, it’s pretty much fine. You don’t need StumbleUpon. If you want to show off your del.icio.us bookmarks, WordPress has a del.icio.us widget to help you. You just have to specify your username and it shall display your bookmarks in your sidebar depending on wherever you put it.
About my social bookmarks, I’m afraid that was my fault. It was too complicated and too basic. I can provide a website which can give you a button which will generate tags automatically. I will post the link in another comment because this comment might get caught if it has a link in it.
About the categories, that’s the catch with some WordPress.com themes. Not all of them are able to display all the things that we want to. There are many themes which don’t display the blogroll and hence you have to manually create one using unordered lists like I’ve done. Knowing some basic HTML will help actually. I shall give you a link to a tutorial website that will easily teach you this. When there’s a good tutor to teach you and you want to learn, nothing is difficult.
RSS Feed is something very useful and Google Reader is one of the most amazing things they ever made. Yes, every body can read your feed. If you’ve seen your header carefully, there are two links just below the name of the blog. One of them says “Entries RSS”. That link is the feed of your blog and the other link is the feed of your comments. So now anyone can click on that link and subscribe via what ever reader they want. You can also put additional links which attract the readers because most of us subscribe via feed these days. It’s absolutely impossible to visit some 40 websites everyday, isn’t it?
Putting the digg button is an easy job. Actually I suggest you read the WordPress documentation and FAQ’s because they answer most of the things, and they answer them well.
About how some people make some text appear in colourful boxes, that’s done by using the blockquote tag. It’s there with the bold, italic buttons. This will center your text with respect to the remaining text and it will look different. I don’t know how they put the boxes though, even I haven’t ever been able to figure that out. Maybe every theme has it’s different way of showing blockquoted text.
hey poonam, Let’s exchange links, I’m linking you
Brilliant video.. Thanks for sharing it… Friends / people keep asking me what RSS Feeds are.. how to use it .. n blah blah!…. Im just gonna send me to this post now..! :)…
I use StumbleUpon because – A) Delicious is not so delicious when it comes to eye candy, B) I needed a second Blogroll C) I hate signing in to Yahoo. I don’t use it for “social bookmarking” as it says. 🙂
I use the most simplest way of getting an RSS feed. Use firefox, go to Tools | Options | Feeds and change it to your favorite feed reader. Then when you go to a site that you want to subscribe, click that red feed icon next to the address, it will show an XML feed and show a message “add to”. Just click okay and done! If you need the feed url, [to add into other programs] just copy the address when it shows the XML feed. 🙂
I think you should check Netvibes if you need something feature rich for feeds. For offline, get Sage for FF2, or get Flock!
Don’t ask me about tags, I use categories and don’t bother with the tags. lol. Although I know they work the same. It might have been a temp problem with WP.com
@Nishu…Thanks for telling me those google tips…
@Ish: You actually cleared my misconceptions. the del.icio.us widget is to show my link? ok..nope, now that I know what is it about, I don’t want it.
Yes, I think last theme I used did not have widget for categories. The link for HTML tutorial will help, I hope it is interesting.
Google reader has made life easy for me to read all my blogs, but I do not know how to use my reader to take feeds for comments as well? And I also want to put Subscribe by email on my blog. How should I do it?
I will try to find about that digg button. I guess Nishu had it in his last blog.
The boxes for quotes I was talking about can be seen at Pradeep’s blog: http://www.pradeepkumar.com/. And I do not know what is blockquote. 😦 Need to educate myself.
@Ashish: Firefox seems to be your favorite…I will check out Sage/Flock/Netvibes. I will pester you again if I get stuck with either of them.
Oh…I missed responding to comments by Pradeep and Amyth..
@Pradeep: Ok, will do 🙂 …but your blogroll seems to be most ignored part of the blog 😦 I think better placement or font change could make difference..just a suggestion…and my name is Poonam Sharma and not Alchemist Poonam 😛
@Amyth: Glad that you found it useful..there are more such beautiful videos on common craft’s blog.
Well I go with Flock actually but because it can be buggy [in its new avatar its more buggy] I have to use IE although I can’t wait to go back. Thats because you don’t have to worry about Delcious, Photobucket, Flickr or Feeds, they come integrated! Hit me back anytime and I’ll respond as soon as I can.
I would really suggest Netvibes over Google Reader if you have the bandwidth. You’ll love it immediately with the themes! 🙂
Ashish, bandwidth is really a problem when you surf when on a slow wireless internet connection…actually netvibes is not running well on my laptop… 😦
Uh, and no body told me is there a way I can set a default font style in my every wordpress post..I have to always copy a code to have same font in all my posts? And how do I take back up of my wordpress blog?
yeah I know, but i thought i’ll keep alchemist poonam :),ok, i’ll change it
n about my menubar i was gonna change it too