This is a guest post from Duncan who is an online marketing specialist and keen blogger representing a producer of natural beauty products and skin care products.

Blogging has come on a long way since its infancy. All bloggers could do back in the day was write a post, give it a title and maybe include a few hyperlinks if they were lucky. Nowadays however there are all sorts of widgets, plugins and extensions to help make the blogging experience a richer one, both for blog owners and their readers. WordPress has undoubtedly had a big part to play in this development, allowing the masses to develop the open source code and customise blogs to suit their needs. The other blogging platforms aren’t too far behind however and their progress is driven by the very human desire to make things better and more engaging.

One such development that many blog owners are taking advantage of these days is music players that they can either embed into their posts or individual pages. A couple of examples of these are the ‘Audio Player’ plugin for WordPress , which can actually be imbedded in any blog if you know a bit of code. Or Groove Shark, which is a customisable widget that will play music on your blog from their own diverse and extensive collection.

Using music on your site can really enhance a visitor’s experience. If you are trying to create an ambiance or have a clear theme on your blog, music can reinforce this. You might also like to showcase your own music on your site so you can get feedback or maybe catch the ear of someone in the industry? What you need to be careful of however is crossing the line between enhancing a users experience and putting them off by forcing your audio choices on them.

It is worth remembering that everyone has different tastes and may not like the music on your blog. Also, these days many people have their own music players open whilst browsing the net and don’t want their songs interrupted by what you think they want to listen to. With this is mind it is rarely a good idea to have music start playing automatically when people arrive on the site, but instead give them the option to turn it on if they so wish.

For example, on this site the music player is closed when people arrive

But if you want to you can open the music player by clicking on the arrow and the song starts to play. In this case it is Michael Jackson’s – Man In The Mirror…classic!

The key is, by all means give your visitors something to listen to when they visit your site and read your posts, but don’t try to force anything down their throats or assume they want to listen to your choice of tunes.

When I started Blazing Minds it was just a way for me to blog my thoughts etc. But since then the blog has really grown up, it’s now an avenue for Guest Bloggers bringing their wisdom to those that are reading the blog on a daily basis.

So now after over 500 posts, nearly 4,000 comments and several Guest Bloggers posting on the blog, Blazing Minds has really got to a point where it is something that has done better than I originally hoped for, those that are writing constructive comments have certainly helped and since starting the blog I would like to think my blogging has improved, though I do keep to my style, if I didn’t then it just wouldn’t be me

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It’s just so surprising how quick the weeks seem to fly by these days, it only seem like yesterday that I was sitting here and grabbing all the information to make last weeks Weekly Round Up and yet here I am again with a collection of blog posts I’ve enjoyed reading, my top commentators, most read posts and more..

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Welcome to another interview in my new series, as mentioned before each week I will be interviewing a fellow blogger who has kindly answered my blogging questions, so let’s get on with it…

Q: Please tell my readers a little something about yourself?

A: First of all thank you for the great and awesome opportunity to introduce myself to your readers. Hello everyone, my name is Salman. I am from Hyderabad – India. I am a student come part-time blogger. I love blogging, making money online, gaining and sharing knowledge. Take a look at my blog Blogging Tips.

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It has been announced on the Official Blog Engage Blog that it has closed its registrations and is now only allowing invited members, this was bound to happen as the community has grown since it started.

Blog Engage is one of the best sites to get your blog seen, commented on and generally improve you experience in the blogosphere, its members get to submit their article for other to view and vote on and then you can also do the same vote on new articles, comment on them at Blog Engage and on the actually blog.

So do you like the sound of BlogEngage?

If your answer is yes then you need to join, there are two ways to become a member of BlogEngage.

• Join the Blog Forums and request an invitation by posting.
• Know a friend on the inside. All members have the opportunity to send you an invitation.

I’ve been a member of BlogEngage since August 2009 and have found some great blogs to read and met new friends along the way, so it’s a brilliant blogging community, one of which I highly recommend.

So what are you waiting for

So your blog site or hosting provider suffers an outage that lasts more than a few hours. What do you do to make sure your blogging time is as efficient as possible so that you can hit the ground running when your site comes back up?

In my case because my outage was caused by a Denial of Service attack that spanned several days I didn’t want to deliberately promote or encourage people to visit my sites, as this would cause them to hit page cannot be displayed, or time out errors from my blogs having outages. CommentLuv couldn’t contact my blogs to even display the latest feed article due to the outage, so it made commenting and leaving backlinks something that wouldn’t have been as productive.

Instead I turned to focusing on writing articles, using good old fashioned Textpad and just writing and writing, with the intention to just queue all the articles when my blogs came back online. I also used the time to publish a few haiku’s on associated content and write a guest article for some other sites. The bottom line is, even when your site is unavailable you can use the time to still be productive for your site.

Here are some top things you can do to still be productive with your site while under an outage (besides just writing as many articles as possible to queue for later).

• Network and build influence on Twitter by taking some time to friend people in like categories, be interactive and promote other peoples articles instead of your own for a little while.

• Repeat the above with any other Social Network like BlogCatalog, Plurk, Friendster, Digg, BlogEngage…etc.

• Read up on some of the latest articles submitted to BlogEngage or Twittley, and tweet, vote and promote those articles if you found them good and interesting.

• Tune some of your browser bookmarks or build a new favorites list of blogs you visit often and can easily access and visit by opening all links in the same folder.

What are some of your tips on being productive for your blog, when your blog is down or inaccessible?

-Dragon Blogger

Yet again it’s time for this weeks Saturday Six and this week topic was chosen by myself and there is only one question with six answers..

1. Six Blogging Tips that every blogger should know?
   

There we go, one question with six answers for you to have fun with…

Ok, that’s it, thanks for taking part and I’m looking forward to everyone’s answers. Don’t forget to hit the “Tweet” button in the SexyBookMarks to ReTweet this weeks Saturday Six.

Anyone using Twitter can be part of the process by tweeting me a topic, I will then pick one randomly and the chosen topic will be used and the tweeter will have a DoFollow link to their website or blog as a thank you.

If you would like to nominate a topic then simply tweet me @RemBeatZ with your nominated topic and the hash tag #Sat6

Also if you take part in the Saturday Six you can join the Saturday Six Twub.. And don’t forget to vote for me at my interview at BlogInterviewer.