Hey guys, Brandon here from TechnoBuffalo and in this video I’m going to show you show you how to customize your sub-blog, your tech blog. We give you a lot of tools to be able to change the logo, add your own ad code, and even change all of the side bar items so that you can make your Tech blog your own.

So let’s go through what we have right now. So the logo, you can change, I’m going to show you that, the ad code you can change. Scrolling down the list here, we have buttons for your YouTube Channel and your Twitter address and those come from the social networks, so when you edit your profile, be sure you plug in your YouTube Channel if you have one and your Twitter handle URL if you have one of those so that these button become linkable to those areas. Here we can search the blog. Below that we have this neat little scrolling item that allows you to show people your most popular posts, your latest posts, a list of your comments, a list of your tags and it allows people to subscribe to your RSS to subscribe via email.

I’m going to go over to my Dashboard, my WordPress Dashboard for the Brandon blog and I’m going to click on TechnoBuffalo members theme options. Now I can change the colors of my TechnoBuffalo blog, let’s change it to green. I’m going to click save changes. And if I go over to the blog, refresh the page, thins will turn green, very subtle but basically it’s an accent color that were allowing you to change, perhaps if you have a favorite color of if you logo has certain colors in it.

Speaking of logo, I want to add my own custom logo. I’m tired of looking at your logo here. So I am going to paste the URL of my banner, click save changes, and refresh the page—that’s better. Go down the list, you can enter in your own Google analytics code if you have an account which is great because you can track how much traffic you’re getting to your tech blog, where the traffic is coming from, and so on and so forth. You can also add in your Feed Burner RSS URL and your Feed Burner ID, so that you can track how many people are subscribing to your tech blog via RSS.

Now that we have a logo in place, let me show you how to change the ad code. So if you scroll down the page here in the TechnoBuffalo member theme options, you can see that I can add either Google AdSense code if you have an account, or I can just make a static banner, for which I need to provide the URL and a linking destination for the URL, so again, like I said, a lot of people are linking to their YouTube page or their Twitter page and you can do that here by uploading the image and pasting the URL and adding the destination. Now it’s important to note that if you add AdSense code, it will disable the static banner linking up here, so it’s either one or the other, you can’t have both obviously.

So one of the greatest parts of WordPress is its ability to let you add sidebar widgets, we give you a handful of widgets that you can use to customize your site and in the future we will be adding the new ones. We split your sidebar actually into two different spots so here we are on my sub blog, and there is a sidebar on the left called Sidebar 1 and a sidebar on the right called Sidebar 2. So let’s go back to my Dashboard and I’m going to scroll down to the left side where I see widgets. And over here on the right, you can switch between Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2, I’m going to stay on Sidebar 1 and add two of my favorite widgets, the first one is actually Twitter tools which will show a live stream of my Twitting on Twitter and I’ll show you in a second how to set that up, there is actually another option that you have to go through in order to setup your user name and password.

So, if I want I can click edit and by default, it says “What I’m doing.” But instead I’m going to change it to ‘My tweets.’ I’m going to click done. The second widget that I am going to add is an RSS feed which is a live RSS feed of my favorite site, perhaps my YouTube Channel or anything like that. I’m going to click edit, I’m going to paste in the URL of the RSS feed of my favorite Tech news site, ENGADGETS and give it a title, so I’ll call it obviously ENGADGET. I can choose how many options I want there to be displayed, I’m going to choose 5, and you have some other options here, I’m going to leave it as default. And I’m going to click save changes. I’m going to click back over to my blog and refresh the page. Here we go, so here we have ‘My Tweets’ and you can see the recent tweets that I have made or I can click more updates to actually be linked to my Twitter page or the Twitter page of anyone else that you want to keep an eye on, and here is the RSS feed from ENGADGET with five items.

So in addition to those widgets, we give you a lot of other ones such as Buffalo Messenger which is our intrasite communication tool, who’s online who will let you see who is online right now on TechnoBuffalo, plus other ones such as links to your tech blog, links to your pages and so on and so forth.

Let’s talk about customizing the Twitter integration. So if you scroll down to the left side of the page, you’ll see twitter tools. From here, you can put in your Twitter handle and your password, and you can also select multiple options to have a new tweet made every time you make a post in your sub blog which is very convenient because you don’t have to go in, paste the URL and say, “Hey, here’s my new blog post on TechnoBuffalo,” and this plug-in features a variety of options that really lets you get granular with the settings and how the Twitter integration actually functions, very easy to use.

And finally, let’s talk about the ways that you can customize your sub blogs, we’re going to be providing links to WordPress tutorials that are very, very in-depth in case you still need some help in creating new posts and that sort of thing, but lets go through some of these items here.

IF we go to tools, we have the option to install something called WordPress Turbo which will store files locally in your computer so that it speeds up WordPress a lot. A lot of people really liked this and it’s maybe something that you’re interested in. Under settings, we can click general, and here is where you want to go to change the title of your blog which is good for search engine optimization. So, as you can see I called my blog, iPhone Tips & Tricks. But right now at the top, it says Brandon, just another TechnoBuffalo weblog—well I can change all that.

I’m going to change my blog title to iPhone Tips and Tricks and I’m going to make the tag line Hack your iPhone. I can change my email address, I can change the date format, and when that starts, let me hit save changes and see the change that has been made. Perfect, up here now it says iPhone Tips & Tricks, Hack Your iPhone, just the way I want it.

Let’s continue down here and go to writing, here we can choose some other options such as the size of the post box, whether a mode con should be converted to actual graphics, and you can also change the default post category, the default link category, let’s go to reading, from here, you can choose how many posts show up on your page and it’s set to 10 by default, in discussion settings, you can choose really the behavior of the commenting on your sub blog. Privacy, from here you can decide if you want your sub blog to be visible to the search engines and I don’t know why you wouldn’t got get more exposure that way, then Permalinks, lets you determine the structure of the Permalinks and the Permalinks are the URLs that are used to individualize a post. So if I want to send someone a link for my thoughts on the Zune HD, I’m going to click on that title and up here is my Permalink and you can change the structure of your Permalinks so you can have it have the month and the name or listed with the number, or even a customed structure if you prefer to have it that way.

And one final note before we wrap up, the buttons that you see here, well there are two buttons right now are actually the active categories, so we put these up here so that people can get to your site and they can say, “Oh, this person talks a lot about Xbox 360. There’s a link in his bar to it,” and you click on that, it drills right into all of the posts that you’ve made with the category Xbox 360.

So that’s it for a look on how to customize your sub blog on Techno Bffalo. We hoped that the blogs give you an opportunity to get your voice out and to talk about technology, to make videos about technology, and to use TechnoBuffalo to help get more exposure to the great work that you do.