Did you know that you can track comments to your posts?

So far, this blog has exceeded my hopes. You guys are making such great posts and we're already seeing ideas come to life. For those of you who are not terribly familiar with Blogger, I am putting together this quick tutorial on how to track your comments, without having to come back and scroll through all the posts.

This will be easiest for those of you who already use an RSS Aggregator of some sort. An RSS Aggregator is utility that allows you to monitor updates to enabled website. I happen to use Bloglines, and will demo how I use it here, but there are many options to choose from.

Any image can be clicked to make it bigger.

Step 1: Extend your post
Go to the very bottom of your post and click on the time stamp.

This will cause your post to come up by itself.

Step 2: Click the link marked, "Post Comments (Atom)"


Scroll down to the bottom of this page and look for the link marked, "Post Comment (Atom)"
This will open the RSS feed. Depending on your browser, it may come up as just a page full of text or, as per the example below with Firefox, it will come up as a neatly formatted page. Go to the address bar, copy the link and enter it into your RSS Aggregator application.



If you are a Bloglines person, you can do the following.


After copying the RSS feed URL, click the ADD button in Bloglines .
Enter the address into the URL field and press, SUBSCRIBE.


Now you can click SUBSCRIBE again or you can be a bit more organized about it and create a folder just for comments.

First, click the FOLDER pull down.
A dialog box will appear. Enter the name of the new folder. Click OK.
Then click SUBSCRIBE.

For all subsequent feeds, you can simply opt to save them directly to this new comments folder. Easy Peasy.

Now, whenever you check your feeds, you'll be able to see any new comments posted to your entry.

Team Calmer

For those of you working with Calmer, here's a button for you.

Anyone interested in submitting other button designs should feel free.

Buttons and Banners on Blogs, oh my

We finally have ourselves a little header at the top of the blog, and until someone comes up with a better design (hint hint) it'll stay.
Here's a little button that I hope you'll each take a post on your blog with a link back here.



If anyone else wants to come up with some cute buttons, please feel free. We obviously have a wealth of creativity out there. I'll post any buttons you create, on the sidebar, so other may use them as well.

How to label your posts

I may be an optimist here, but I'm hoping that this blog will end up with lots of very active members. One of the reasons we are currently limiting your yarn choices is so that individuals can find useful information and inspiration specific to their project. If the blog takes off as we hope it does, it will be cumbersome for individuals to have to slog through the archives to find relevant posts. To make this easier, you can use Blogger's labeling tool to indicate the topic or topics covered in your post.

Labels should indicate items such as:

• type of yarn
• name of project
• topic of post (sketches, swatches, hems, sleeves, etc)
• milestones/status of project (finished, frogged, on hold, update)
• other as relavant
  

Luckily, this is very simple. While editing your post, you will notice an area at the bottom with a field marked "labels."

Label field

Simply enter your labels here. Please type your labels in lower case for consistency. Separate each item with a comma.

For example, if your project is named, Joan of Arc and is worked in Denim, and you are discussing your swatches, your labels might be:

joan of arc, denim, swatching

Note that "joan of arc" is in lower case and that the other words are separated by commas.

Before you select your labels, though, it's a good idea to check all the other labels in use. For instance, we don't want to have the labels; "swatch," "swatching," and "gauge swatch," all referring to the same thing. Instead, you want all posts about swatching to be labeled identically.
To check the existing list of labels in use, simple click the "Show All" link next to the label field.

Click the link next to the label field to toggle the display of labels in use.

You can simply click the label you want to use, to have it appended to your existing list. Feel free to make new label, but make sure that you aren't creating unnecessary labels in the process.

Quickly get to your topic of choice from the homepage

From the homepage, you can click on topics that interest you and see all properly labeled posts.