Author:Michael Silva
The Google Blog Bar is an AJAX Search API application that lets you easily add application and page-controlled blog search results to your web pages or blog.
It provides search-driven bars of blog search results which are highly
customizable. It allows you to specify the blog bar's positioning, the number of
displayed results, the list of search expressions that drive it and more. You
can even dictate which blog results are displayed by using either the APIs or
links on your page.
You start by embedding the Blog Bar search code into the web page of your
choice to display either a thin horizontal strip, or a tall vertical strip of
blog search results. Adding the Blog Bar to your page is quick and easy using
the available creation wizard which will walk you through some simple
customizations and generate all of the code for you. Once you have generated the
basic code you can adjust as needed.
On the surface the new Google Blog Bar might seem to be just another slick
little addition that you can add to your pages in an attempt to keep up to date
with the latest and greatest gadgets. Or, a way to add some additional
functionality to your web pages and a possible useful service for your visitors.
All of that is true but if you open your mind to the possibilities and look a
little deeper you might just find a fantastic way to pull the different aspects
of your Internet business together.
If you have a companion blog for your main website, (if you don't have one I
suggest you set one up immediately after you finish this article), you can set
up a Google Blog Bar on all of your website pages and have it only pull the feed
from YOUR blog. The normal way of setting up a Blog Bar would display feed
results from blogs other than your own and could easily result in your precious
visitors clicking away from your site if they see a headline that interests
them. By restricting the results to just your blog you can tie both your website
and blog together seamlessly with natural click thrus occurring when something
of interest is shown. This is absolutely perfect if you actively post to your
blog and also have multiple categories.
Here is an example of what I am talking about. Our main website at
icanteachu.com
has the Google Blog Bar installed on the bottom of every page. You will notice
that the title on the left side is always branded to us with the actual blog
category it is showing headlines for next to it. The title of the actual blog
posts show to the right of that along with the date posted. If you were to see a
headline that was of interest to you and clicked on it you would be taken
directly to that post on OUR blog. Because the blog and website work in synergy
with each other to present out material we win either way the visitor decides to
go.
After a 25 year career in the food manufacturing industry I started looking
for something I could do on my own terms. I decided to partner with a long time
friend to create a multi topic content site. A work in progress for sure... You
can check out the main Google Blog Bar website here:
http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/blogbar/index.html
Article Source:
http://www.bloggertalk.net