Proto-blogging by Jill@flickr
“Proto-Blog”
Jill @ flickr

Design & Template

  • You can use any combination of colours; it’s a personal thing. But try to make the words easy to read and easily distinguishable from the background, and don’t make them too small.
  • Pain-in-the-ass navigation. You want me to play hide and seek using my mouse? I’m outta there.
  • Hacking your theme so that it’s only viewable in Internet Explorer. You’d be surprised to know that most themes and templates work in all browsers, until you add in that little sidebar thing that fucks it up.
  • Which brings me to this: do you need that many sidebar widgets? Most of them don’t mesh well together in terms of looks and they slow down your blog’s loading time.
  • Too many ads sticking into the posts, on the top, on the side and at the bottom; popping up and under. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers - do you hate your blog too now?

Posts

  • Long posts are fine but break it up into manageable paragraphs of 4-5 sentences each. Add a horizontal line even. Think of that last good book or magazine that you’ve read - it didn’t have a page long paragraph did it? And punctuate!
  • A whole month’s worth of posts on your front page. And with tonnes of uncompressed full-sized pictures. Ugh!
  • Spell-check muthafuckas! Do it!
  • Too much use of the dot-dot-dots. Like … erm … this … yeah … but … no … but … yeah. Quit it.
  • tEEn SPeAk raWKs LOL! ZOMGWTFBBQ! ORLY? l33t hax0r FTW!!111oneoneone! One throw-away line is cool and funny but the entire post?! It took me 10 minutes to type that. How the fuck do you do it? No, don’t tell me.
  • And CAPS! And SUPER HYPER EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!! You got me with the first exclamation mark ok?

Content

  • Quote correctly. Give credit where credit’s due with a proper link back. Don’t be lazy.
  • Don’t quote the entire post. That’s borderline stealing and plagiarism. Even if you do link back to the original source.
  • If you get an inspiration for a post, say which blog post you got it from. Again, it’s about link love. The other blogger would notice your link and come check out your blog even. That’s a good thing.
  • Do not hot-link ever. Unless the blog owner explicitly gives you the code to hot-link an image or two, you should always save the image on your computer (right-click, save as) and upload it onto your own blog. Unless it’s on a free host like Blogger, stealing other people’s bandwidth ain’t cool. Not hot-linking is also good practice because even if the original image is gone, you’d still have a copy. And state your source with a link as always.
  • Auto-playing songs and videos. Just say no.

Comments

  • None of this “1st comment!”, “2nd!” crap. Don’t comment if you got nothing intelligent to add.
  • On the other hand, if you do have something intelligent to add don’t write 4-5 paragraphs of it. Write it on your own blog and link back to the post.
  • Comments which only point out the grammar and spelling mistakes in a post and nothing else. I know I had said above that a blogger should always spell-check and write proper English, but mistakes do slip through. If it doesn’t impact on the story that the blogger is trying to tell, your anal comment makes you look like a douche.
  • Anonymous cowards who flame! Grow some nads and argue like an adult.

“People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” Do you have any general comments about this blog? Flame away!

If it is not the blog but the blog owner whom you have a problem with, please write a post on your blog and link back to me. I love me some links long time! :mrgreen: