Tutorials – Mediocre Mum

So what the hell is Pinterest?

Someone recently asked me if they should ‘do’ pinterest?

And I responded…..yes, without hesitation!

I don’t use Pinterest as much as I should. However, I use it in a way that is similar to favouriting/bookmarking websites that grab my attention. The benefit to doing this is I end up with a visual reminder of the website. Unlike favouriting, where I have to remember the name of the website and where I filed it, which on most occasions, I can’t. Then I find myself trolling through my history, which is not ideal as I can barely remember what I had for breakfast yesterday.

So what I do, is when I’m surfing the net and find something I like I just hit the Pin button in my browser.

Alas, I hear you shout, where is that button? I use Chrome instead of Internet Explorer for a number of reasons. Go to the Chrome Web Store and Search Pinterest Button then scroll down to extensions. You will see I’ve already added it but it’s the third option.

From this day forward you should see the curly P in your browser bar, to the right of the address, so when you find a site you like, simply hit the Pinterest button, choose what board you’d like to add it to and voila it’s easy to find again.

As I have an unhealthy obsession with my slow cooker, I tend to Pin a lot of recipes, including my own recipes which drives a fair amount of traffic to the blog. I find it a godsend when I’m looking for meal inspiration! I’ve recently made this board open so other fans of slow cooking can pin as well. Click the image below to visit the board.

As part of the #PinItForwardUK campaign, I have the pleasure of introducing Susanne Remic, AKA Ghost Writer Mummy. She originally started blogging to cope with the traumatic birth of her son, but has now hooked up with Jenny Edspire, who recently lost her nine month old daughter to SIDS and have set up a collaborative board called Learn Through Play.

I’m in awe of her boards and am drawn to ‘Stuff to do with Kids’ and ‘Parenting Tip’, god knows I need the help!

Happy Pinning!

Do you get hacked off logging in an out of different google accounts to check your analytics?

The Problem

When I first started this blog I added it to a Google account that I had created using my hotmail account. Then I set up a gmail account for Mediocre Mum. I found that I was forever having to switch between the two and I hate a faff.

The easiest thing to do, it will seem blatantly obvious once you see it, is to add yourself as an administrator. This is the best way to do it without losing all of your data.

How to

1) Log onto your original google account>go to account>products>analytics

2) Then select the account in the top left in the orange banner

3) You should then see a user tab and add new user. Add the google email address you would prefer to use, make yourself an Admin and finish by clicking on add new user.

Now when you log out of this account and into your other account you should see your blog listed. I hope this helped.

Any problems, do shout.

How to create a Custom 404 using Thesis

What’s the first thing you do when you see one of these? If you’re like me you close the page and head back to Google and try again.

This is a really important opportunity for bloggers to gain a new reader, but you only have a few seconds to capture their attention. So why not create a custom Page Not Found (404) and encourage them to stick around.

Recently, I went to an SEO Academy organised by The Tots 100 and led by David from Distilled UK. We spoke about 404 error pages. They won’t hurt your site, but can affect your bounce rate (e.g. how quickly people leave). 404s can happen if you delete or move content around or if someone else incorrectly links to your blog. If it’s an error on your behalf then you can always try and fix it. If it’s an incoming link from another website/blog you can contact their webmaster and ask them to update the link or you can redirect them to your custom 404 page. I will go into redirecting in more detail in another post as this is going to be a long one.

How to find the error pages

To find a list of your 404 errors, you will need to log into your Google Webmaster Tools > Your Blog>Health>Crawl Errors>

Click on the Not found Errors

A list will appear at the bottom of the page. Click on one of the links>Then linked from and it will show you where the link is coming from.

How to Create The Customised 404 Error Page

I followed the following tutorial from Deborah Ager. It was incredibly useful and this is where you should start as well. However, there is a few things you should note.

The plugin she refers to is no longer called Thesis Open Hook but is now Open Hook by Rick Beckman if you have trouble finding it. I did!
As the plug in has been updated, so have a few of the screens. Below are screen shots of exactly how I set mine out.

a.) On the general tab select thesis

b.) Select thesis_hook_404_title from the drop down box

c.) Select thesis_hook_404_content from the drop down box

3.) Lastly, do not freak out if you can’t write code. Neither can I, but I can copy and paste. Always remember that you can use wordpress to set up your page, just like you’d normally set out a blog post in the normal Visual Tab adding text and images, aligning, formatting etc. Just remember to save as a draft and not publish it.

But then remember if you click on the Text Tab you will see all of the code. Again, do not panic, just copy it. Then head back over to the plug in settings and paste.

So how did you get on?? Did it work. Do let me know if I missed anything.

Now it’s time to redirect people to your fancy smancy new error page.

How to add YouTube Videos to Facebook Landing Page

This post assumes that you’re already familiar with adding Facebook FBML pages, if not take a step back and have a look at Making the Most of your Facebook Fan Pages, which will show you how to add one to your fan page.

To tart up your Landing Page on Facebook you may want to add a video like I did, Introducing My Family, to make it more welcoming to new visitors. For the most part it’s straight forward. You’ll need to copy and paste the following code into your FBML page but you will need to replace the xxxxxxxxx with your youtube video id.

<fb:swf

swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”

swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxx’

imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/xxxxxxxxxx/2.jpg’ width=’340′ height=’270′ /></fb:swf>

For example

My youtube URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7wSuWwQQps

So, I replaced “xxxxxxxxxx” with “b7wSuWwQQps” in both places (without the quotes), resulting in:

<fb:swf

swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”

swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/ b7wSuWwQQps ‘

imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/ b7wSuWwQQps/2.jpg’ width=’340′ height=’270′ /></fb:swf>

However, you will notice that the starting image is badly distorted and there’s not much you can do about it unless you are familiar with Photobucket. If so, upload the photo and then insert the image code. This is what mine looked like. I hope you can piece it together.

<fb:swf

swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”

swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/b7wSuWwQQps”

imgsrc=’http://i786.photobucket.com/albums/yy145/mediocremum/ScreenHunter_01Oct302018.gif’ width=’340′ height=’270′ /></fb:swf>

Good luck! If you get stuck please do ask and I’ll try to help.

Making the Most of Facebook Fanpages

After Reading Emily’s (@MTJAM) guest post over at Blogger.ed about Making the Most of Your Fanpage I set about trying to apply some of the suggestions and to say the least it wasn’t that easy. Emily suggested, along with a load of other great ideas, to get a Vanity URL for your Fanpage and then to create a ‘Welcome Mat’. So, I thought I’d summarize for you what I did in the end to save you a lot of headache.

I like many others was guilty of having a very un-dynamic Fanpage with minimal interaction. I’d set it up to automatically import my blog posts using RSS Graffiti and then left it at that, only popping by every so often. So, all I had in the end was a wall covered in blog posts, which wasn’t very welcoming to new visitors.

1.) How to change your Facebook Fanpage URL

Once you have 25 ‘likes’ on your page you can change your Fanpage’s URL to something more meaningful. I’ve changed mine to www.facebook.com/mediocremumsfanpage . Do give the name some thought as you can’t change it later.

2.) Creating a landing page with a welcome message

If you’re not familiar with writing HTML code like me, I find Google a godsend for helping with code. If you want to know how to make text bold; just type in HTML for bold. If you want to know how to make a Header search for Header HTML, then all you have to do is a bit of copying, pasting and inserting your own text.

After I managed to get a bit of text on my welcome page I got a bit carried away and decided to add a video ‘Introducing my Family’ to my Welcome Page. In an effort to keep this post shortish, click here to see how I did it in the end.

Thanks again to Emily for all her suggestions, I’ve learned loads.

Photo Credit