The itch to write

Follow Blog.com on Pinterest!

ASM — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 18:01:33 +0000

We’ve recently made available a beautiful Pinterest widget which everyone can us to display their pins on their blogs!

To know what our users are pinning from their blogs, we decided to create a Pinterest profile ourselves, so you can now follow Blog.com on Pinterest.

We’ll be adding boards and pins from Blog.com blogs as we go along, so make sure to stop by!

Featured Blogs – Fev/Mar12

ASM — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:40:50 +0000

More and more blogs for you to visit and interact! Here are the February and March featured blogs on Blog.com!

Miranda Jokers

ALLISON RHEE

A Favored Life

Right Photo Image

Úton	These Glowing Embers
Timmie Town	Cami Rose Photo
i saloni	Marfa Peterburgskaya
Dollish	The Yellowest Diamonds
Belén Montecinos	He hunts, I create
Lala	Architekturum
Viajando por aí	The Other Castle
MoAE Story Photography	Of Shows and Burritos…
The Hungry Cat	Bow & Blossoms, The Blog
CASALE A610	Design Tree

Also worth checking out!

Widgetize away with the new Pinterest & Email updates widgets

ASM — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:07:12 +0000

By now you’ve probably heard of the latest internet boom called Pinterest. So have we. And as the service grows and more Blog.com users pin their things, more are the requests for Pinterest sharing buttons. As far as the social sharing is concerned, we’re working on improving the Social Sharing feature on our platform.

Meanwhile, you can start using our Pinterest widget, which is already available in APPEARANCE > WIDGETS in your blog’s dashboard. Adding to that, we’ve also added a Subscribe Form widget, which you can use to add email subscriptions to your blog.

Driven by these two additions to our platform, we’ve also decided to replace the Follow me button on the Twitter widget for a prettier one.

So here’s out it goes. On the left images you can see how to set up the widgets in your dashboard. On the right you can see the final result in the blog itself.

Keep in mind that widgets appearance vary according to the theme you’re using. And speaking of themes, just a quick reminder of our special Easter packs. 5 premium features for just $99!

Also worth checking out!

Premium Features for a special Easter value!

ASM — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:13:36 +0000

Though Blog.com’s unique religion is the blogging one, we’ve prepared some special packs for you this season.

Go to the UPGRADES section in your blog’s dashboard and you’ll be able to save up to $52 with our 2 Easter packs:

Easter Pack #1

Time limited offer of our most popular upgrades for great price. Save 35% with this Bundle, and pay just $99 instead of $151! Power-up your blog!

***

Easter Pack #2

Another Easter goodie! Save 20% with this Bundle, and pay $68 instead of $86! You’ll get our best themes, and the chance to add a domain to your blog.

The best part? You can get it not only this week, neither until the next week but the whole month of April!

Praise Blog.com!

Also worth checking out!

SEO Options

ASM — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:32:34 +0000

Upon our dashboard makeover last October, we removed the SEO options menu on posts pages.

Nowadays, we automatically optimize your blog in order to achieve good search engine rankings. All of your posts and pages have well formatted titles, descriptions and keywords based on its content.

However, we felt that our users should be able to edit their blog description for search engines, so we introduced some SEO options in the SETTINGS menu of your blog’s dashboard.

So you can now go to SEO OPTIONS and edit your homepage meta-description and meta-keywords.

Tweak how you want your homepage to be shown on search engines. If you’d like, leave it blank and it will fall to our default settings. Below, you’ll see an example of how you can fill out the SEO form.

Example of a meta-description and meta-keywords for Blog.com

Don’t forget that the blog’s title and tagline you insert in SETTINGS > GENERAL are also very important, since they’ll appear in your blog’s search results.

Below, you’ll see an image of Google’s search result for Blog.com.

Blog title – define it in SETTINGS > GENERAL;
Blog tagline - define it in SETTINGS > GENERAL;
Homepage description - define it in SETTINGS > SEO OPTIONS;

That’s it! If you’d like any further reading about meta-descriptions and SEO, we recommend you to visit ProBlogger, Mashable or search the web for best practices on writing meta-descriptions for SEO.

Happy engine optimized blogging!

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4 New Themes & Celebrating our 100th theme with a super discount!

ASM — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 16:18:14 +0000

Happy day before St. Patrick’s day everyone!

Here’s what’s been going on:

Blog.com was represented at CeBIT, one of the biggest IT trade fair in the world, which took place between 6-10 March in Hannover, Gemany. For all of those who came by our stand, thank you and, if this is your case, welcome!
Our Facebook page now is now a super timeline!
We had some problems regarding images and some performance issues, but all major troubles have been fixed (our Support Team is now dealing with some particular account problems, so if you’re in this group of people, we’re on our way!). Nevertheless, thank you everyone for your understanding.
Our apology comes with making available 4 new themes for you: Structure, Yellow, Spiky and Sundance! Please check each theme’s details below.
With Sundance, we’ve reached 100 themes! Wow. We do give special attention to this area, since we like seeing beautiful & distinct blogs on Blog.com. To celebrate, here’s another treat for y’all: until March, 24th (next saturday) you’ll be able to get our Premium Themes upgrade for only 50$ !

Uff… I think that’s all. Now behold of the new themes and, if you fall in love with one of them, go to APPEARANCE > THEMES and activate it.

Structure (premium theme)

The Structure Theme is a responsive, modern, minimally designed theme with a magazine style layout. The theme is designed to adopt the style of the content added, making it an ideal theme for a variety of markets including art and design, music, magazines and informational blogs. - Organic Themes

Features

Colors	Black, Grey, White, Dark, Light
Columns	Two Columns, Three Columns, Left Sidebar, Right Sidebar
Width	Fixed Width, Responsive
Features	Custom Background, Custom Colors, Custom Menus, Custom Header, Featured Images, Featured Posts, Content Slider, Theme Options, Threaded Comments, Widgetized Footer, Premium Theme
Subject	Magazine, Personal
Page Templates	Archives, Blog Entries, Full Width, Portfolio

Demo: http://structuredemo.blog.com/

Yellow (premium theme)

Yellow! is an awesome minimalist one-column PSD weblog theme with elegant typography and nothing to distract from the main content. The main body text is centered on index and justified on single page with letterpress text effect. (by WP Charity)

Features

Colors	Black, Grey, Yellow, Light
Columns	One Column
Width	Fixed Width
Features	Custom Menus, Featured Images, Post Formats, Threaded Comments, Widgetized Footer, Premium Theme
Subject	Personal, Tumblelog

Demo: http://yellowdemo.blog.com/

Spiky

Spiky is a beautiful grid-based theme, developed by WP Charity and perfect to showcase DIY works & recipes and mixing it up with regular blog content.

Features

Colors	Brown, Creme, Green, Orange
Columns	Two Columns, Grid System, Right Sidebar
Width	Flexible Width
Features	Custom Menus, Featured Images, Post Formats, Search Box, Threaded Comments, Widgetized Footer
Subject	Magazine, Personal

Demo: http://spikydemo.blog.com/

Sundance

Sundance was crafted with clean, elegant typography and close attention to detail. The home page offers a featured video carousel. It supports the video post format, widgets, custom background, custom header, custom menus, and a custom link feature for your social media pages. (by Automattic)

Features

Colors	Light
Columns	One Column, Two Columns, Right Sidebar
Width	Responsive
Features	Custom Background, Custom Menus, Custom Header, Featured Posts, Post Formats, Social Icons, Theme Options, Threaded Comments
Subject	Personal
Page Templates	Full Width

Demo: http://sundancedemo.blog.com/

Also worth checking out!

New theme: Verbage

ASM — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:48:51 +0000

To celebrate the 6000 (6,002 to be precise) fans on Facebook, we’re presenting a new theme: Verbage

The Verbage Theme boasts a clean, modern design with a heavy focus on typography. It’s the perfect theme for bloggers, authors and editors. - Organic Themes

Features

Colors	Black, Grey, White, Light
Columns	Two Columns, Three Columns, Left Sidebar, Right Sidebar
Width	Fixed Width, Responsive
Features	Custom Background, Custom Colors, Custom Menus, Custom Header, Featured Images, Featured Posts, Content Slider, Search Box, Theme Options, Threaded Comments, Widgetized Footer
Subject	Magazine, Personal
Page Templates	Archives, Blog Entries, Full Width, Portfolio

Demo: http://verbagedemo.blog.com/

Also worth checking out!

Featured Blogs – Dec11/Jan12

ASM — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:11:00 +0000

After all the fuzz around the 1st Blog.com Awards, time to get back to the usual routine here on Our Blog, so here’s the December/January selection of featured blogs (click the image to access the blog).

Get inspiration to make a superb blog and someday your blog will be here too!

The Flower Power

For the Love of Food and Photography

BBC F1 Fans

Encan silencieux	Le Journal de Léna B.
Rock Star Dad	Lady Gaga Media
The Anime Novel	Allison Suzanne Photography
Warsztat Mamy	e2k News
Sofie Yndestad	wCv Creatives
The Raven Wine	Sky Net
EmpowART	Le blog des Loulous
Lego Head	Aliza

Also worth checking out!

Christmas Bundle – Last Chance!

ASM — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:40:38 +0000

Everyone, go find your wallets asap. The Christmas Bundle offer will be up only until February, 10th.

In case you’ve forgotten what this bundle is, we’ll sum it up for you:

What will you get:

How much will it cost you:

Minus $25 it would normally cost, which means a total of $58 for all these premium features.

How will your blog benefit from this:

You’ll have tons of storage space to upload all the photographs & videos you want, while having the possibility to customize your blog’s appearance to make a beautiful, distinguishable and ads-free site. Plus, you’ll be given the chance to make a little money for yourself, by placing your own publicity. When you finish putting it all together, you’ll get rid of the blog.com domain and use your blog as your own personal site, by registering your own custom domain.

Lovely, right? Grab it the Upgrades section of your blog’s dashboard.

Stop SOPA

Blog.com — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:22:03 +0000

As you might have recently heard, SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, a United States bill introduced by U.S. Representative Lamar S. Smith to stop online piracy, interdict search engines to link to other sites, unauthorized streaming and a lot more of senseless, unreasonable measures.

And although Blog.com defends the right to copyrighted intellectual content, we do feel, as most of web services, that some measures might cause countless damage to people’s right to share information (of any kind).

So, if you wish to support or start supporting the STOP SOPA movement, you can go to Settings > General on your blog’s dashboard and choose to display a ribbon at the top right corner of your blog, just like we’re doing right now.