YES! It's my FIRST Tipsy Friends Feature!
To help me kick off Tipsy Friends today, is a veteran Malaysian mommy blogger - MG of Mumsgather. I call her a veteran because she's been around Bloggyland since September 2004. Mumsgather is not her only site, mind you, she also blogs at Parenting Times, Mothering Times, Quotes Station and Be Health Aware. One of the reasons why she has so many blogs is so she could feed her passion for writing. She just loves to write, write, write! She's also just recently become a lensmaster at Squidoo. In her Squidoo lenses, she recommends many useful sites for children to play and learn online. As you can see, she's a very resourceful blogger. MG is a SAHM and has two children aged 7 & 9. I don't know how she does it all, you'll just have to ask her yourself.
When I first started blogging, I stumbled on her site and sent an e-mail to her to ask for some blogging advice. She was very willing to help and support a newbie like me and was never selfish with her knowledge. She's like a mother hen to me in Bloggyland. She was also my first blogger follower and I'm really honoured to have her be my first Tipsy Friend too. Welcome to my bloghome MG!
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My not so new (now) blogger friend Germaine has started a new and very interesting feature on this blog called the Tipsy Friends Feature where she will invite her faithful readers to write a guest blog post each. What a wonderful idea. I am honoured that she has invited me to be her first guest post writer. That is a tall order! I better get to work IMMEDIATELY otherwise I will hold up all her eager guest post writers! I am sure there is a long line waiting. I thought about what to write and naturally blogging tips came to mind because that is my first love, after my family. So here it is, my top blogging ‘skills’ to make blogging fun.
Skill #1: The Most Important HTML Code
What is the most important HTML code you need to learn? You don’t need to be a HTML expert for this. Why, you don’t even need to know what HTML is. All you need to know is how to copy and paste. Most of the time you don’t even need to use HTML codes because your blog has a WYSIWYG editor but it will be useful for other times when you don’t have this editor available like in a comment box for example. The most important HTML code you need is the one to do a hyperlink. Here it is:
<a href="url">link text</a>
That's it. You can use this anywhere that accepts HTML code for example in a comment box. Lets say you want to link back to your own page because you have written a blog post in the past which you think will be useful to the blogger’s post which you are commenting on. You just key in this code and replace “url” with “your blog post url” and the link text with any text you want. Go ahead and try it in the comment box. Link to something from your page. (Just remember not to spam other people’s pages this way. Link only when you think your url will contribute to what’s being said). Just in case you want to know more about HTML which stands for HyperText Markup Language you can go to this page w3schools.com. You will get many more tips and other HTML codes which you can copy and paste.
<a href="url">link text</a>
That's it. You can use this anywhere that accepts HTML code for example in a comment box. Lets say you want to link back to your own page because you have written a blog post in the past which you think will be useful to the blogger’s post which you are commenting on. You just key in this code and replace “url” with “your blog post url” and the link text with any text you want. Go ahead and try it in the comment box. Link to something from your page. (Just remember not to spam other people’s pages this way. Link only when you think your url will contribute to what’s being said). Just in case you want to know more about HTML which stands for HyperText Markup Language you can go to this page w3schools.com. You will get many more tips and other HTML codes which you can copy and paste.
Skill #2: Where Can I Find Fun Stuff For My Blog?
The best place to go for fun and cool stuff for your blog is The Generator Blog. I love this! You can generate and personalize just about anything here. From motivational posters to book covers, banners and more.You can use the images that you generate on your blog without worry about copyright issues. A picture says a thousand words, what more a personalized picture! I prefer to blog anonymously, so this is the place I go to for fun images for my blog because I hardly ever post up my own pictures and I do so want to have images to make my blog posts look better. When you use images from others, you must remember to give credit.
However, there is still a worry that sometimes that image was taken from somewhere else in the first place. Here is one site which gives me peace of mind when using the images - Arthur’s Free Clipart is one of my favourite sites to go to for images.
Another fun image generator site is SignGenerator.org. You can generate just about any customized image you like and paste them on your blog. There are plenty to choose from. Most of the images are humorous but better still, you can customize them and its free!
Skill #3: CSS Fun
It would be fun to make your blog posts pretty like in a magazine wouldn’t it? You can achieve this with CSS. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets but again, you don’t really need to know that. The only skill you require is how to copy and paste. Just out of interest though, you can go to w3schools again to learn CSS. Or you can copy and paste amazing magazine style looks and text tricks for your blog from Mandarin Design.
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Thank you MG for sharing some blogging resources with me and my readers!
