A kind lady called Sarah encountered my blog, was horrified by what she saw, and and proffered this suggestion for tweaking the standard blogger template to add the readability of long articles by adding the heading to the footer section.
Eventually, I managed to successfully apply the changes (she left a spurious space character to ensure you have a little work to do) so I hope you enjoy the changes as much as I do.
So, you have set up the blog, got loads of interesting ideas for articles, robots and spiders are crawling everywhere, Adsense is configured and has already produced a massive return of 0.27USD and you are all set to go. One last problem, what are you actually going to call this blog ?
What's in a name ? Well quite a lot actually. I usually like to read the title and extended description of any blogs I encounter. I think the title alone can tell you quite a lot about the author and the content.
Unfortunately, I am totally devoid of imagination. That's one of the reasons I was never in a band. I simply would never be able to think up song and album titles let alone lyrics. The other reasons are that I can not play any musical instruments, sing or dance.
My imaginative offering for the name of my blog is currently 'Andy C' for the title and 'Blog in Isolation' for the description as it seems quite apt. Originally, this blog started out in life hosted at blogger, under a large black cape of anonymity and was called 'RomanTotaleXVII' because no-one in the world knows what it means (the name is a character from a Fall song).
'Blog in Isolation' is a reference to a wonderful song 'Soul in Isolation' by the most underrated band in Manchester - The Chameleons.
Other candidate titles considered were:
Absolutely anything can be a suitable subject for a blog entry; a Website of interest, OpenSource software, breaking news, a personal anecdote, a witty comment from a colleague, politics, a joke, a holiday, Microsoft, music, gadgets, your teams latest victory, anything.
Just because someone else (an esteemed blogger or maybe even a professional journalist) has written an article on the same subject, don't necessarily let that put you off. Lots of people are searching blogs for a personal view and not that of a journalist. For example, if I am considering the purchase of a digital radio for my car, I would rather hear your views on the same make and model rather than read a two year old review in AutoExpress.
As for technical content, while there might be reams of manuals, a wealth of text books and assorted wizards engaged in long running, complicated discussions with religious fervour that simply overwhelm you, remember that there will always be newcomers struggling in silence to insert their first row into their first table. So, if you have just written a squash ladder in PHP and mySQL, go ahead and share your knowledge.
If you can't think of anything to say, say nothing. Don't be afraid of radio silence. Personally, I don't bother with sites offering solutions for writers block such as '99 subjects to blog about' as I am not really interested in your response to 'If you were an animal, what would you be and why ?' [Although curiously enough I was asked exactly this question at interview once !]
Think about your favourite Web sites and blogs and why they are of particular interest to you. If you love reading about long haired Persian cats, and you have a long haired Persian cat, then write about that as it's likely that this will appeal to a group of people with similar interests.
Don't get discouraged because no-one comments on your blog or nominates you for 'Top 100 Blogs'. Think of all the blogs you have read in the last week with interesting, valuable content where you never had the common courtesy to take the time to say 'Thanks'.
Finally, think carefully about any brilliant ideas that surface while under the influence. Your audience may enjoy it immensely but you might live to regret it.
Doug Burns recently was kind enough to refer to my little, embryonic blog.
I had been lurking around the Oracle blogs for a while and had commented on a posting on Doug's blog about his wife's positive reaction to the recently launched Teleport service (TV and video on demand)
Now this wasn't purely a trite comment is a desperate attempt to get someone other than the Technorati bot over to my blog. I am a Telewest customer and had previously remarked on the launch of the Teleport service on my own blog.
However, it struck me that if I had been at UKOUG and if I had just happened to be introduced to Doug Burns (an admittedly unlikely but possible scenario), would I have uttered the same words to his face as I posted on his blog ?
Now you're back from Birmingham UKOUG, take your wife out for a meal. If she is getting 'excited' about re-runs of Tuesday night's BBC news and Binge Britain Uncovered on Teleport, she desperately needs it :-)
And, well, to be honest, I am still not sure. I guess it would have depended on whether he was wearing a kilt or not.
Take some time to think of ideas and develop content for the blog. I tend to jot down lots of different ideas for possible brilliant, informative articles for the blog. However, most get discarded as when I subsequently re-read them, I discover that they don't even make sense or interest me. Some ideas are developed and refined over a longer period while other blog entries are more spontaneous.
As you are composing the article, review the text carefully as you go. If the blog editor has a 'Preview' option, use it to review the text again before finally hitting 'Publish'. When the article is published, review it yet again. I almost always still manage to find a nonsensical or rambling sentence on this final pass. I also subscribe to my own feed and read the article in Thunderbird where there is still scope to find the odd typo which is irritating as it means modifying and re-publishing the entry.
Although you are not writing an essay for an English exam, people are more likely to enjoy the content if the article is well structured and readable, spelled correctly and free of careless typos. I prefer to use English and avoid the use of slang or text message speak.
Keep the article short. Maybe I am unusual but I have a very short attention span. If a blog entry is five pages long then I am unlikely to persevere right through to the end unless it really is compulsive reading. Similarly, I tend to break articles into short paragraphs to be easier on the eye.
If the article is long or contains detailed technical content (code examples), consider breaking it into separate, shorter articles (Part 1 of 4) or maybe present the material in a different format (like a conventional Web page or write a book).
Don't. Build it and they will come (probably). Try and focus on the style and content of the blog. Try to keep updating the blog on a regular basis. Make it easy for people to subscribe to the blog by creating an RSS feed - Feedburner is a popular, free choice. If you have succeeded in getting people to visit the blog and, better, maybe even subscribe to it, try to keep new material coming otherwise the blog will surely wither and die together with the interest of the your audience.
It is worth setting up pings so the main blog search engines index your blog. I manually ping Technorati after posting a new article (and check my posting gets indexed in due course) and just let Feedburner automatically ping a few more blog services.
I have also started to include Technorati tags at the end of the article. Initially I was a little reluctant to include tags that are specific to Technorati as it may be superseded in the future by another technology (remember how Altavista got obliterated by Google) but the use of Technorati tags does appears to be standard practice in the blogging community and does help in driving traffic to the site.
Try not to succumb to the temptation to go around adding meaningless comments (e.g. 'Great blog!') to other blogs in a subtle effort to get people to come and visit your blog. Even though, you succeeded in passing the onerous word verification test, this is not much better than spam and some might consider it rude. Instead, try to provide some useful contribution to the topic in question.
Do not put Google Adsense ads on your blog. Ads put me off almost immediately and waste valuable space on the screen. The dot com boom and been and gone. I would love it if you prove me wrong but no-one is going to get rich from a personal blog.
Don't become obsessed by the statistics for your blog. However, this is easier said than done and I find myself spending time, pouring over the Web logs and statistics reports for my blog. Maybe the analysis of the Web statistics (spiders, robots, RSS readers and the occasional human being) what was popular, the growth of the blog over time, spikes, the relative popularity of different referrers etc would be the basis for a interesting article.
I was just looking at my Web site and spontaneously decided to end its sad, sorry life. Static content unchanged in years with dead links with little of interest to anyone. Part blog, part bookmarks, part experiment in HTML. Now consigned to the Internet archives.
I just created an RSS feed for my blog using Feedburner. It was actually quite interesting to see how my blog was presented in different RSS readers (Thunderbird, Google Reader and Bloglines) where the textual content is the same but may be presented in many different ways and styles.
I once lost quite a long, rambling blog entry due to some finger trouble in the blogger editor so subscribing to the RSS feed will be a quick and easy way to backup the blog.
Another nice feature of Feedburner is that it will automatically ping a number of sources when the blog is updated.
Creating this blog was an experiment and, somewhat to my surprise, I quite like the concept. So I have decided to host my blog on my Web space over at blueyonder. This isn't because I think Telewests hosting service is any more reliable than blogger (never had any issues at all with blogger) but so I can peruse the Web server logs and referrer statistics that Blueyonder kindly gather for me. The transfer of the blog went surprisingly smoothly and I created a placeholder blog to grab the old namespace on blogger.
According to Technorati, a new Web log is created every second which is an amazing statistic and about 55% remain active which is even more staggering.
The creation of my blog was actually a little experiment to see what all the fuss was about and, secondly, to see how long it would take for someone to wander along and be motivated enough to add a comment to the blog.
I did not publicise the blog in any way (mainly because I haven't got any friends) apart from adding it to blogger listing and I was curious to see if it would ever generate any traffic or interest.
So today, one month and eleven days after I created this blog, I received the first comment from someone in Germany. My life is complete - almost.