Some quick technical notes

For anyone who might read this blog who is interested in some of the technical "behind-the-scenes" information, I thought I would put a note up here about some changes I've made to the blog - all using free technology!

If you are not a blog geek, feel free to skip this post: it's definitely not "required reading." :-)

Feedburner Email subscription. Feedburner is an RSS feed service that takes the feed from any blog, and lets you reuse and reformat it in all kinds of ways. One option is to create an email subscription service so that people can read your blog via email. I'm using Feedburner to do that - sign up, if you are interested! Meanwhile, I discovered yesterday that when you edit an old post, it shows up again in the daily email. That was a surprise to me, so I poked around and found an option that I think will prevent edited posts from showing up as new in the email (instructions here). Fingers crossed; I'll be able to see tomorrow if it worked.

Labels. Blogger has recently created a system for "labeling" posts, and I've been trying to make good use of that. At the bottom of each post, you will see what labels have been used for that post, and you can click on the label to see other posts that have the same label. I've also created some links in the right-hand column of the blog, so that people can get quick access to blog posts with similar labels. For example, here are the blog posts so far labeled as Bible Women. This is still a bit unwieldly in Blogger, since they display ALL posts with the same label on a single webpage - and that webpage can get very long. I hope in future that Blogger will offer some better options for taking advantage of the labels on posts to organize the post pages, archive pages, etc.

I think that's it for now! I've posted previously about how I included the Google Calendar at the bottom of the page, and how I added the FreeFind search engine. I'm tagging these posts as "admin" so you can find them at this page: Administrative Posts.

Please don't be shy to ask technical questions about the blog, or to suggest improvements. I'm amazed at what can be accomplished with 100% free software and services like Google, Feedburner, etc., and I would definitely like to provide information that will encourage others to strike out on their own and build their own blogs!