The Old Soup has been left on the stove with one of those oily films coating the surface that you need a blow torch and a wrench to remove.

For the brave tFolk out there, many juicy nugs can be found underneath the filth and refuse here--especially those hearty tbloggers with the desire to make the tBlog Sports template work.  Nevertheless, the chef has turned toward weightier matters, a new project: The New Stone Soup .

We're having another go at revamping tBlog templates.

The Old Soup 

The Fifth Step
Step Navigation
Day #6

With our new skills, we dropped anchor after anchor all over this blog, and a few other blogs, as well. Our readers now navigate the "Build a Blog" Blog sea with ease, inspect one port after another without losing their direction, drifting from one ridiculous metaphor to the next with only the most brief bouts of sea sickness to show for the wear.

Not all of the Stone Blog members are so lucky. Some of the Stone Bloggers haven't had the time to prettify their own blogs.

Short on time but loaded with sympathy, we decided to pursue a simple but wonderfully useful trick: automatically redirecting traffic with a single line of code.

For example: as mentioned, one of the Stone Bloggers, TPS, fell victim to the tBLOG tides of change, and without the gumption to explore the cutting edge possibilities of the new system, his site has waned and washed away.

Fortunately for TPS, he runs a legitimate blog elsewhere. If he could find some way to redirect his tBLOG regulars to his new blog front while tBLOG tidies up the shiz, well, then, la-dee-da for TPS.

At the Template Chooser, he clicked through to the Add/Edit HTML page. As described in The Third Step: Heading to the Side Bar, he located an accessible, numbered Custom HTML block (probably block #1 or block#2 for everyone at tBLOG) and added this code:

This is a meta tag: a piece of information that describes to the rest of the web what kind of information can be found within your blog. Most sites have several meta tags: they help search engines locate your web pages, they instruct different browsers as to how your pages should be read, and they declare to the world how often your blog content changes. Your blog has meta tags, provided by tBLOG automatically--but there's no reason that you can't add one of your own.

The key section of this particular tag is the content. TPS tells your browser not to wait (0); hurry on to another URL where his real blog can be found. Once he's added this meta tag, every visitor who visits his tBLOG page will be redirected to his active site. Because browsers take time, even when encouraged to hurry, you will catch a glimpse of his tBLOG blog before settling at the real deal. Check out his meta tag in action here. To add the meta tag above to your own blog, just replace TPS's web address with your own, and place the tag in your own Custom HTML section.

But what if your own tBLOG blog works swell? Why bother with a redirect? Well, take a gander at our "Build a Blog" Blog. Beautiful, isn't it? But we thought of an interesting way to use the redirect. As you may know, we are producing our own blog as we proceed through these lessons. Why not set up a redirect at our building site that would bring you back to a specific spot in this very article? We could likely save you one, maybe two mouse clicks, and keep your place in the lesson at the very same time?

In order to create such a sweet set up, we need to review our anchor skills. We also wanted to offer a suggestion as to how you can use the redirect yourself, to create a more dynamic experience for your own readers. Try creating a second tBLOG account, and filling that blog space with photos, movies, podcasts, book lists, or even advertisements to increase your already massive cash stash. You don't need to load that site up with hilarious article posts, because you'll keep those at your real-deal blog. All you have to do is set some nifty anchors on your storage site next to each of your sparkly goodies. Meanwhile, you have already added your meta tag to the storage site, which will gather your reader back into your welcoming bosoms. This is how we did it:

We set an anchor at the end of the sentence you're reading now, so when you click here to check out our "Build a Blog" Blog, the "Build a Blog" Blog meta tag will bring you back after only ten seconds!

Yikes. We hope that worked, yes we do. If it did, then we might as well explain the simple steps.

1. We set an anchor at the end of the previous sentence, with the name "redirect".
2. We added a meta tag at our Blog Building site, with this code:

Huh. That's it. That's all we did. The only differences between this tag and TPS's tag are that it here, we give you ten seconds to look around (compared to the "0" that the miserly TPS offers), and, of course, we redirect you back to our own site, instead of flopping you at TPS's own blog.

*HOME*

--Stone Blogs
--Copyright ©2006 Stone Blogs. All rights reserved.

The Fourth Step
Step Navigation
Day #4
(No need to click here . . . yet.)

With our Building the "Build a Blog" Blog side bar fixed up rather nicely, we wanted to add more ways--easier ways--for our readers to move around inside our blog.  Web developers who own web sites spanning many different web pages do not need to contend with ultra long content pages; but rent-a-page bloggers are usually offered but a single page to post their articles.  By the time a blogger posts a handful of articles, the casual reader will have to scroll down for ages before locating an article that interests them enough to stick around.

Even if your blog is beautiful and sparkly, what are the odds that someone will sift through all your articles?  It's a long shot at best, we think--especially against a random web surfer (the rare individual who does a google and clicks onward to your door step) having the patience to give you the time of day.

So let's make it easier for that guy to find something interesting.

We're talking about setting anchors everywhere throughout your blog.  What's an anchor?  An anchor is simply a target for a link.  An anchor is an address, or, rather, the address of a specific apartment number within a mega-complex.  Your single blog page will be your mega-complex, and your anchors will be the rooms.

The first step is deciding where the most important places live on your blog.  For Stone Soup Blog Forum, the most essential location on our page is the navigation system, which, thanks to our side bar work, is ready for action.

We wanted our readers to have easy and frequent access to our lesson list.  If someone stumbles into our blog by clicking on an article, and the article happens to be Step 32 rather than Step 1, we need that reader to click to that first step, or even to our mission statement, before they despair and flutter away, lost and lorn.

Therefore, we dropped an anchor at the beginning of every step we post, and another anchor at the side bar heading, Chronicles.  Go ahead, we dare you: give it a click.

Setting an anchor at the top of an article is an easy, one-step process.  When you are writing an article in Advanced View, fill in your title and then move on to the body.  In the second toolbar row, about two thirds of the way toward the right side, you should see a pretty little anchor icon.  When asked for an anchor title, give them one.

Our example will be step4, the title of our anchor at the top of this very article (note: the link "here" at the top is not the anchor, but rather a link back to a specific point in the content).   

Okay, you're done.  Not too bad, right?  Just remember your anchor name, and where you put that particular anchor.  Now, suppose your article becomes ridiculously long (the article you're reading right now might be an appropriate example), or suppose you are writing an altogether different article that refers to the first article.  If you don't want to force your reader to wipe the dust off your archives, you simply add a link to the anchor.

When you click the cool smiley, you are really clicking a link to our step4 anchor (at the top, click the here link to return).  We inserted a smiley here, as you can see, but you can use words, photos, or whatever weird crap you think up for yourself.  We highlighted the smiley, and clicked the link icon on the toolbar, located two spaces to the left of the anchor icon.  This is the link address we provided:

Actually, we really only needed to provide #step4 for the link address, because "#" tells your browser to take you to the requested anchor located on your current page.  However, when tBLOG archives one of your articles, or moves you to the commenting page, you are no longer located at the blog home page.  To counter, we ask the link to direct us to a specific page, and then to the specific anchor located on that page.

That's it.  Anchor dropped, link set.  As you most likely noticed, most of the links we included in this article are links to anchors on our own page.

If you want to be as clever as we are, if you want to stick an anchor in your own navigation bar just like we did, you should now be able to do it yourself (if you understood Step 3: Heading to the Side Bar).

However, if you have any trouble (remember, each template behaves differently), do not hesitate to ask us for a blathering, futile solution to your problem.

--Stone Blogs