Blotanical News

When you submitted your blog to Blotanical one of the questions that was asked was whether you wanted to be included in the Search facility. We have had nearly a 100% take-up on this preference and so every time to write a post, Google indexes it and makes it available to those who search through Blotanical.

This is such a wonderful resource for garden bloggers who are needing some more info to complete their posts or deal with some gardening issue. For example, if you were trying to find out some info on "Erigeron", typing the keyword into Blotanical search would bring up all the bloggers who have discussed this genus for you to visit and learn.

While this is all very helpful, where do you navigate to to use this resource?

First option

The first option is probably the best for people who are NOT using the latest versions of either IE or FireFox browsers. That is because the older versions don't have auto-discovery of search engines enabled.

So, let's keep it on this site and click the Search Blogs tab. The default page is the Search Blogging Content with an input field from Google asking you to type in your keyword or phrase and then click Search. This will then bring up all the results that are available.

The next option is by far the most exciting and if you're using FireFox 2.0 or IE 7 will give you even more access.

Following the directions in Option #1 you should reach the Search Blogging Content page. Now cast your eyes up to the top-right corner of your browser where your Search Engine bar is located. You will notice that the symbol is now flashing a different colour to what it did originally.

Click the downward arrow to the right of the Icon symbol and you will be presented with a menu and at the bottom will be a link that says Add "Blotanical Search". Click this link and Blotanical Search will be added to your list of available search engines.

Once it becomes a part of your search engine list you can easily use it just by clicking the downward arrow beside the recent icon. Now you can use it to just search all the garden blogs contained within Blotanical without having to visit Blotanical! Easy, huh?

One small note: While it is my aim to ensure that this runs smoothly, there is a small hiccup when using the search. After typing your keyword or phrase into the search bar and clicking the Magnifying glass or clicking Enter it will then only show you the new bar on the page, like this;

Simply click the Search button and your results will be shown.

How do you know if your site has been included in the search results?

There is an easy way to find out if your blog is being listed in Blotanical Search. Just type the phrase site: [your blog url] in the search bar (here's an example site:www.gardeningtipsnideas.com) and it should list at least one entry to your home page. If not, then there's a good chance that your site hasn't been included, or Google hasn't yet indexed your blog.

Posted by Stuart at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Being the basis of how Blotanical operates, it may pay to take a few minutes to hone your skills interacting with the Google Maps.

They're a great way of locating and finding garden blogs but without the tools at your disposal, they can seem difficult and unworkable. So let me explain a few of the basics;

Here's the map we all see when we first arrive at Blotanical. It's the highest zoomed out version of the globe and allows us to see each country in a flattened out map. The Flower icons dotted across the globe display where individual bloggers are located.

You can find every garden blogger from this spot or you can choose one of the regional headings (Oceania, US, UK etc) in the navigation bar. These links are still the same maps that have been centred on a particular location and zoomed in a few more times. They have been created for the purpose of traversing the globe faster. Plus, each region only displays the blogs that reside within it.

From this perspective you can see that some of the US map is cut off, namely the extreme east and west tips. This is okay as it still fits in most of the blogs located in this region. However, you may want to zoom in closer where the Flower icons are congested or zoom out further to find Christopher in Hawaii. How do you do that? With this tool;

The top 4 arrows are for moving from east to west and north to south. The bottom two are for zooming in and out. Click the "+" to zoom in one level or the "-" to zoom out one level.

However, if you want to do this quicker than clicking on the buttons the same thing can be achieved with your mouse.

Place your cursor on a location (not on a flower) and left double-click to zoom in, right double-click to zoom out. Each time a zoom occurs it centers the map wherever you clicked your cursor.

If you want to move from left to right or up and down then, while holding your left click, move your cursor around. Cool isn't it?

What to do if the Flowers are hard to see on the map background? Change it of course with this tool located at the top right-hand corner of the map;

The default view is Map which is what you see whenever you first look at one of the maps. It shows boundaries, borders, cities, roads and other map features. These change with each zoom level.

The next view is Satellite. This removes all the cartographical features and just shows the satellite images with landforms. Like this;

It may be hard to see where exactly the blog is located in the midst of these landforms so another option is Hybrid - basically a combination of Satellite and Map.

And that, in a nutshell, is how you use Google Maps. Feel free to ask questions in the comments field and let me know if you found this helpful.

Posted by Stuart at 5:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)