When Google+ launched last September, we all rolled our eyes. Another social network? Oh boy, how ground breaking… It seems a lot of people shared our sentiments, and G+ has been slow to gain traction and attention. However, a recent re-design and the launch of a few new features make it worth a second look.

We recently had the opportunity to vist Google and get the low-down on how Goggle+ can help bloggers.

Here’s what we learned.

Why is G+ beneficial to fashion bloggers?

• Circles allow them to tailor their messages to different types of fans, as well as allow for them to communicate with both their fandom and close friends/family all in one place.
• Hangouts and Hangouts on Air will allow them the chance to get personal with their fans and interact with them on a more intimate level.
• Search Plus Your World and Authorship will increase their visibility right from Google search, which most everyone uses as their primary source of information.
• +1s allow them the ability to see what individual fans are interested in more specifically, while Ripples let bloggers know how and where their content is being shared and what is being said about it.

How does G+ differ from Facebook?

Unlike Facebook which is very much a social destination, Google+ acts as a social layer over the web. Google+ is the integration of all Google products, and will only grow to become more spectacular from this point on. Their unique features including Hangouts and Circles, are also a major point of differentiation.

What are the best practices for bloggers on G+?

• Interact with other bloggers on G+. This will help you to spread the word about your own G+ presence.
• Add the badge to your blog and link your blog & other web properties to your G+ under the “Contributor to” section, under “About.” Adding the badge to your website and utilizing your Google+ will grant you authorship.
• Post unique content, often.

Do you use Google+? Why or why not? Tell us in the comments!

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I’m sure you’ve all heard the term “RSS Feed” – and you probably use Google Reader, Bloglines or a similar feed reader to follow all the blogs you want to keep up with on a daily basis. Let’s face it, as much as we’d love to visit every blog we love everyday, there are just too many! So we turn to our feed readers… What does this mean to your blog? And to your site traffic?

We have a few quick tips to help you use your RSS feed to it’s full potential, without loosing traffic.

But first let’s start with the basis – what is an RSS feed?

• RSS = Really Simple Syndication. Without getting all technical on you, an RSS feed basically turns your blog posts into a file that can be read by a feed reader, allowing it to be easily distributed outside of your blog.
• Feed Reader (also called an RSS Reader or and aggregator) – This does just what it sounds like, it reads the RSS feeds. A Feed Reader can be on the web or on your desktop or mobile device – it collects updated from all the feeds you subscribe to in one simple place.

And now – IFB’s RSS Feed Tips for the Blogging Community:

• Make it easy to subscribe to your feed. Have an RSS logo near the top of your blog (you’ve seen them – the little orange and white squares? In fact, check out the right side of our navigation bar – it’s right there!)
• Consider using Feed Burner. Feed Burner lets you track how many followers your feed has – it also tracks when your posts get read, and when your readers click through. This is all valuable information you can use to optimize your posts.
• Share your photos. You have the option of leaving your images out of your feed – however, I think this works against you. When I’m browsing my reader I don’t pay attention to the posts without pictures. It might seem like it would encourage people to visit your blog, but I find it upsets the flow of my reading.
• Include extra links. Put your social share links right in the body of your posts – that way they can be easily tweeted from the Feed Reader and your readers followers have the chance to visit your site. Think about adding links to similar posts at the bottom too – giving people incentive you click over to the blog.
• Ask a question. This is a good way to encourage engagement with your readers. It can help get a good comment chain going, and RSS readers will be intrigued to click through to comment.
• Write snappy titles. This is a basic you should be doing anyway – but it holds true to RSS Feeds, the better the headline the more likely it is to get read!

 Do you subscribe to our RSS feed? Do you use a Feed Reader? Which one? What gets you to click out of your reader and over to a blog? Tell us in the comments!

[image by damon.garrett]

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By Stephanie Brown of FAIIINT

CSS Beginners

CSS is something a lot of people ask my advice on, assuming it is too technical or complex for them to learn themselves, this is absolutely not true. It’s nowhere near as scary as it seems and everyone is capable of learning the basics and using it to customize their blogs. It’s not something that will take months or years to learn, with all the excellent resources available right at your fingertips you can teach yourself the very basics in a few hours.

Layout and design play such a huge role in how your blog is seen and perceived by others, whether they be other bloggers, potential collaborators or future employers, that you should want it to look the best it possibly can. First impressions count and appearance can often make or break future relationships, especially with clients. Not everyone has spare cash lying around to hire a web designer or to buy custom templates, but everyone can, with a little spare time, learn how to do it themselves. So now there is no excuse for a poor or unoriginal design!

I’ve tried to make this as simple as possible, so that even total beginners can alter their themes with ease. Follow the instructions on how to get to the CSS editor for your blogging platform below, then simply copy and paste my CSS code examples into the box and alter the red text to suit your needs. You can go to the bottom to copy the entire code in full, or pick out only the customizations you need from the sections below.

Where

WORDPRESS [SELF HOSTED]
There will be a separate full tutorial next week, stay tuned!

WORDPRESS
To use custom CSS on a free WordPress blog, you need to have purchased the ‘Custom Design’ feature. You can do this by clicking the ‘Store’ button on your dashboard menu and following the instructions. The last time I checked, this was $30 for an entire year (or $0.08 per day) and would require renewing each year. I personally think it’s a great price and a much cheaper option than self hosting!

Log into dashboard → Appearance → Custom Design → Click ‘Edit’ button in the ‘Custom CSS’ box → Scroll to the bottom and make sure ‘Add my CSS to (Your Theme Name) CSS stylesheet’ is selected under ‘CSS Settings’

Note: The first time you customize your CSS, the area at the top for writing your code should be totally blank, if it’s not, completely delete everything inside so that it is.

BLOGGER
For the purposes of this tutorial, the majority of customizations you will be able to make using the Blogger editor and will not need to add the CSS yourself. Go through the various categories listed and make any alterations using the editor. Do not add CSS for any customizations you have already made using the editor, however, if there is something listed below that the editor cannot do simply click the ‘add CSS’ option and add only that customization/s.

Log in to dashboard → Layout → Click ‘Template Designer’ link → Advanced → Add CSS

Tips

• I suggest that you set up a second ‘tester’ blog for which you can try out your customizations first, this way, once you’re happy with it you can just copy & paste the CSS into your real blog, knowing it’s perfect. This saves your readers seeing the unfinished version, and also it’s reassurance for those that are a little scared to try it out, if you mess up the test blog, no big deal!

• All code highlighted in red can be altered to your own preferences. The descriptions also contain red words, these are your options when altering the code.

• Spellings are always North American – so ‘color’ not ‘colour’ – being British this tripped me up no end of times when I was starting out! If something’s not working, check the spelling!

Background

BACKGROUND COLOR
One of the simplest and most requested things I get asked is how to change background colour. It’s a very simple alteration that can make a big impact on your layout and design, however be wise with it – pale colours tend to work best and are the most user friendly. Also note, depending on your theme this may or may not change the colour of the background on your posts and sidebars.

The highlighted hex number can be altered to any colour you wish. See the resources section at the end of the post for a colour picker that will give you the corresponding code for any colour you select. The colour picker tool in Photoshop (or similar) will also give you the relevant code, look for the ‘#’ box.

BACKGROUND IMAGE
To add a background image, first you need to upload an image to your usual image folder and then copy the URL down. Replace my URL with the correct one for your image.

I personally suggest an image which is small and can be tiled to repeat across the entire background.

I’ve also included a background colour here, if your background image takes a while to load, or is broken, the colour will be displayed until the image loads over the top, so make this a similar colour to your image.

The repeat right top command tells the image to tile from the top right corner. This can be altered, but I would suggest leaving it as it is. Possibilities are repeat right top and no-repeat.

Font

Font customization is another simple, but very effective way to add personality and style to your blog. Again, keep in mind your background colour, dark fonts work best on light backgrounds and vice versa, users need to be able to read your blog easily, don’t make it hard for them!

FONT-FAMILY
This is the font itself, such as Arial, Times New Roman, or Verdana. Unfortunately, you cannot just use any font you like. The font must be one that all computers have installed as standard, otherwise it will not be displayed and a standard font will be used instead. This can really affect your overall design, so it is always best to use one of the fonts which are considered ‘web safe’. Click here  for a list and examples of web safe fonts and their families.

FONT-SIZE
This can be any number you want, the smaller the number the smaller the text and vice versa. 12px is the most common size, as it’s easily readable, but clearly smaller than headings and titles. If you do decide to change this, I strongly suggest choosing either 10px, 12px, or 14px.

COLOR
The same as for background, this can be changed to any hex colour code you like. Always make sure to have included the # at the beginning.

TEXT-ALIGN
This tells the text which side to align against, left is the default, but it can also be changed to right, center or justify.

Links

When styling links, a:link, a:visted and a:active should all be styled exactly the same for a clean, uniform look. I suggest customizing a:link and then copy and pasting the styling between the curly brackets into the other ones to be sure. Those 3 are all how the link appears on the page (when it’s unvisited, when it’s visited & when it’s selected), a:hover is how the link looks when the user hovers their mouse over it. It’s common to style this differently to the others, whether you want it to change colour, underline, become bold or it can be styled exactly the same as the others for no change.

COLOR
Again, choose any hex code you like to alter the colour. I think it’s nice to have the a:active colour different to the rest.

TEXT-DECORATION
This is used to add or remove decoration, most commonly to remove the underline from links. The default is underline, but setting it to none will remove the underline from your links. If doing this, I suggest making the link a different colour to the text, or making it bold, so that it stands out as a link and doesn’t just appear as ordinary text, which is confusing for visitors.

You can also use underline just on a:hover, with the rest set to none, this will make the line appear only when the users mouse hovers over it. Slightly more interesting is overline, this is the same as underline, but the line goes over the text instead of under it, line-through puts a line through the middle of text.

FONT-WEIGHT
This can work nicely if you don’t want your links to be underlined, making them bold works equally well for showing the user that it’s a clickable link. The default is normal, change it to bold for bold text , bolder for extra bold or lighter for skinnier text.

All Together Now

All together, this would look like:

References

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp – for CSS help and tutorials

http://www.colorpicker.com/ – Hex colour picker

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In our post about Wantering.com, IFB discussed the legal issues and ownership rights that accompany blog images. It sparked a great conversation in our community about not only how outside companies and websites use blogger images, but also about what our rights are as creators of original content.

As a blogger, you are the publisher, author, artist and owner of all the unique content you post. It’s yours, and you have the right to control how it is used, where it is used and who can use it. This applies to your written words as well as your original photography. Most of the time, we internet folk are pretty lax with controlling the spread of our content from site to site (via Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, etc) because it’s usually helpful. Social sharing is the digital form of word-of-mouth, and it helps our traffic and grows our community. However, instances will arise where it’s important to know what your legal rights are, if you find your content in a place it shouldn’t be, being used in a way you don’t approve.

Below, IFB breaks down 9 legal terms for every blogger that are essential to knowing your rights and protecting your content:

Intellectual Property

This is a broad term that encompasses laws that govern “products of the mind,” and what ownership and rights apply to these products. Specific areas that fall under this topic include copyright, trademark, trade secrets and patent law. Most of what you need to know about intellectual property deals with copyright law. See below.

Copyright Law

This law was created both to protect and foster the creation of “original works of authorship.” Examples of this kind of copyrightable work include blog posts, photographs, videos, podcasts, news articles, musical compositions, and computer software. As the creator of copyrighted content, you have the “exclusive right to reproduce the work, distribute it, display or perform it, and to create derivative works from it, as well as the ability to transfer any or all of these rights.” Though many of us are very lax in our control of where and how our images are distributed across the internet, should you feel violated, you’re within your rights to take action!

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

You can read the DMCA in it’s entirety here, but for convenience let’s summarize it a bit. This act was created to protect as the administrator of a website or other service (like a blog), meaning that you will not be held liable for money damages for infringing content posted “at the direction of a user,” onto your site, as long as you didn’t know about it. An example of this might be posting a video you don’t own on YouTube. It’s not just video though, it could be words, pictures or anything that doesn’t belong to the person that is then published to your site (most commonly in the comments or forums).

Privacy and Publicity Rights

According to the Library of Congress, “privacy and publicity rights protect the interests of the person(s) who may be the subject(s) of the work or intellectual creation.” This means that an advertiser must obtain permission from the subject of a photograph in order to use it commercially, because the subject has retained both privacy and publicity rights in the use of their likeness. For example, a site cannot use your image, wearing Bag X to sell Bag X, unless you give permission.

Fair Use Doctrine

The part of the doctrine that is most likely to apply to bloggers is: Some material protected by copyright may be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder if it meets certain qualifications (editorial, educational, etc.) That roughly translates to: if an image is being used in a creative context, to illustrate a point,  show a trend or something you like (and it’s credited) – it’s usually okay. When that image is used for commerce without consent, that’s not Fair Use. Generally, say you republish a photo from another source to comment on it, or someone takes a paragraph from and then comments on it, that’s okay. If you’re not adding anything, – taking a photo from somewhere else and commenting on it it’s usually okay.

Plagiarism

As many of us learned in school, plagiarism is stealing ideas and content and publishing them as your own. Citing your sources is the easiest way to avoid plagiarism, whether it’s quoting someone or giving them credit for an idea you’re discussing. If you think your content has been plagiarized and you want to take action, first consider your goal. If you want this person or publication to stop and take the content down, look to see if whoever is hosting the site has registered a DCMA, and send a “take down notice” to the web host (GoDaddy, Blogger, WordPress, etc.) and they can take it down. You can bypass the actual publisher. Send a cease & desist letter, because it can take about a year to sue someone and go through the whole process. DMCA notice.

Libel and Slander

Libel and slander are both forms of defamation. Libel is written, slander is spoken. So what’s defamation? A false statement about a person to a third party, that damages their reputation. So basically, lying. (This is a state law, so you have to look up the specific details depending on where you live.) It’s important to note that adding the phrase, “In my opinion…” in front of a statement that isn’t true does not protect you. While your blog does give you a platform to speak your mind and express your views, it doesn’t give you permission to lie about others. (We found this interesting to note, given all the recent comments and questions that arose after after our GOMI interview.)

Terms of Use

Your blog’s terms of use should be set up shortly after your site goes live. (Haven’t done it yet? Now’s the time!) This is how you set guidelines and establish your site’s relationship with it’s users. Here is where you let readers and users know what they can use from your site, as well as what your obligations are to them, and what you can do in terms of editing, removing, and changing material (this also applies to commenting). Users own the copyright to their comment, but you’ll want to make your commenters aware that you reserve the right to remove or edit any objectionable content they post, at your own discretion. There are a lot of different rules you may want to lay out for your site’s users; check out this break down of terms of use for a good starting point.

*To compile this post, we consulted heavily with two lawyers, Ruth Carter of Carter Law Firm and Quinn Heraty of Heraty Law. We also used an excellent online source for Internet publishers called Citizen Media Law Project. We recommend browsing this site for more detailed information about many of the terms and laws mentioned above.

*Disclaimer: Information in this guide is based on general principles of law and is intended for information purposes only. It is not offered for the purpose of providing individualized legal advice. Use of this guide does not create an attorney-client or any other relationship between the user and IFB or the lawyers consulted.

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Ah, Tax Time. Such a special time of year. For some of us a hectic last minute scramble to get everything done on time, but for those who planed ahead it’s just another day. Between working, blogging and everything else we fill our busy lives with, finding time to do taxes seems like a huge strain.

Which got me thinking - we are forced to look over our money each year – to review and budget, why not do the same with our time? If we budget it well maybe we’ll have more of it free, or at least more to spend on things we enjoy…

So, without further ado (don’t want to waste your time now, do we) here are IFB’s Tips for Budgeting Your Time

• Make Lists: Sure, it sounds cliche – but lists are an amazing way to keep track of your tasks. I like to have a few going at once – Today, This Week, This Month. There are also some fantastic apps for lists – try TeuxDeux.com or Orchestra.
• Prioritize: Yes, you can do anything you want to do, but you can’t do everything. There’s just not time for that (unless you can learn to live without sleep!) So figure out what the most important projects are, what you are the most passionate about and what you need to be doing to get by in life. Keep these as top priorities and shelve the rest.
• Visualize your Tasks: I like to use post-it notes. I color code them by project and priority and stick them above my desk. That way I can see what I need to be working on right in front of my face. It’s also very rewarding to pull the post-its off the wall when I finish a task.
• Schedule Downtime: We all need breaks. Take some. If you work constantly you’ll burn out, and then you won’t be able to get anything done! Be sure you are adding breaks to your to-do lists. (ie Cuddle with kitty, Take a walk in the park,  do yoga, etc, etc, etc)

Do you have any tips for time management? Let us know in the comments!

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