Top 100 Language Blogs – We’re nominated!
Along with my colleague and friend Nelba Quintana from Argentina, Nik Peachey from Morocco among many others (well 97 to be precise 
) I’m really pleased to have been nominated as one of the top 100 languague teaching technology blogs for 2009. The “competition” is being run by the folks over at the http://www.lexiophiles.com blog
If you’ve found any of the posts here on Digitalang useful, you’re more than welcome to mosey on over to the link below to leave a vote for me.
Look down the list for the name of my blog: Digitalang (the names of blogs appear in alphabetical order)
Before the name there is a radio button -> click on the button and a black dot will appear. Next, browse down and you can leave (or not) a comment about this blog.
Finally, click on “VOTE” and a new window will appear saying that you have voted successfully-
If you do vote, thank you very much!! If you don’r thanks anyhow for being here and reading this 
4 Comments
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Dear Seth
Please could you tell me how to do a couple of things that you have done with your blog. Firstly I want to be able to have a background image (as you have done) and secondly I would like to be able to have a reply box like yours. How do I get the code to do this and add to my blog(s)? I am using http://www.blogger.com
Would appreciate your advice on this.
Regards
Richard
Hi there Richard,
Well I’m hosting my own blog using Wordpress not the (Google owned) blogging platform blogger, so to be honest how I got my pictures up and how you’ll get yours up are not the same procedure. I actually started out on Blogger a while back, too. It’s a great platform, but I found it a bit limiting (installing your own wordpress blog gives you a lot more freedom. If you plan to blog for a while, it might be an option worth looking into. However, in the meantime maybe this can help you…
Background images – After a quick scout around the internet I found these instructions on how to add a background image to a blogger template. Have a look through those, they seem a little complicated at first, but if you go step by step you should be okay. One word of warning though, backup your blog before making any big changes, there is a tiny chance that you could break it if you go mucking around too deep into your blogs internals!
Commenting – The next thing you want to check out is the comments setting on your blog. Again, I had a quick scout around and found this article on how to allow commenting or “replies” as you put it on a Blogger.com blog. Comments are actually the lifeblood of any blog, so I’d definitely encourage you to get them set up on your blog. It’ll help your readers engage with you much more directly. While I’m at it, can I say thanks for dropping bythis blog and leaving a comment! I hope these ideas have helped you a little.
All the very best and good luck with your ideas!
Seth Dickens
Dear Seth
Thanks for the advice. Regarding the comments box on my site, I was interested in how you get the actual comments box to display as an open form field like yours rather than just the word “comments”.
Thanks again
Richard
Hi there Richard,
I’m not sure here exactly what you mean, but…
If you want to see all the comments with a comment box underneath it, you should direct your students / readers to the actual post you want them to read.
For example your post about video websites should be: http://www.frizzbee.co.uk/2009/05/video-sharing-websites.html to see the comments box as a form field. If you direct your students / readers just to http://www.frizzbee.co.uk they will see your latest post, but not with the comments box attached.
If, instead, you want to have a page that allows people to contact you like our http://www.digitalang.com/contact-us/ page, hmm.. well I don’t know if you can do it with Blogger. There is a simple service contactify, where you can add a link to posts that connects your readers to a “contact us” page, check it out here: http://www.contactify.com/ It looks like they also allow you to embed a contact us form into your blog, which might be more useful to you. The form I actually use though is a WordPress plugin with the very adventurous name “Contact Form 7.” This won’t work on Blogger, but it’s a good example of the flexibility of WordPress and one of the reasons I decided to change hosts in the end.
Hope this has helped!
Seth.