Blog gone bad
August 18th, 2007 2:54:06 pm pst by Sterling CamdenJeff Atwood discusses Thirteen Blog Clichés, common blog practices that tighten Jeff’s jaws. I’ve been guilty of many of these, and I don’t completely agree with all of Jeff’s assessments.
Calendar widget. I just removed mine here on Chip’s Quips. I’ve been meaning to do that for months. It was useful to me, but not to my readers. For me, it acted as a visual indicator of how regularly I was posting. But measurements like that just for my benefit don’t need to be taking up space on the page. I agree with Jeff on this one.
Excess flair. The key here is defining “excess”. I heartily agree that plugins like Snap Shots and Sociable tend to be more bothersome than useful. But widgets like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog really do add more functionality to your site than just displaying “pictures of the last 10 visitors to your blog.” They link you and your readers to other readers of your blog, many of whom are often too shy to comment. I’ve found many interesting new blogs from these two widgets.
The Giant Blogroll. Having authored not one, but two such widgets for WordPress, I naturally disagree. I think your blogroll tells readers a lot about where your attention is going, and provides good suggestions for building their own reading lists. And I don’t think it’s “spammy” to give some ongoing link-love to the blogs you admire. That said, it does take up a lot of real estate. I’m thinking of switching mine to the OPML browser widget with categories initially collapsed.
The Neblous Tag Cloud. I’m the culprit again! I’ve authored one of these widgets and I use it on two different blogs. I don’t know if my readers find it useful, but I often use my tag cloud to quickly locate something I’ve written in the past on a particular topic. In the image Jeff provides (duplicated here on the right), the tag cloud is pretty much unusable, because the tags of different font sizes overlap each other. You can prevent that effect with appropriate styling and by limiting the maximum font size used. When visiting other blogs for the first time, I often look at their tag cloud to get an idea about what topics they write on most often.
This Ain’t Your Diary. As a few of Jeff’s commenters noted, that depends on the purpose of the blog in question. Some of them are. But I’ll agree that if your blog has a defined topic other than being a personal diary, then you need to focus on that subject and avoid including too much personal information.
Top (n) Lists. Sorry, Jeff. Readers eat those posts up, because they know what to expect right from the top. Of course you can overdo it, like anything else.
All of Jeff’s other points provoked my heartfelt “Amen”, especially No Comments Allowed. I even hate comment hurdles like CAPTCHA or requiring registration, although a blogger’s gotta do what a blogger’s gotta do to control spam.
What do you think? Does my mile-long tag cloud just bug the hell out of you? Would you add anything else to Jeff’s list?
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I rarely see your tag cloud unless I’m scrolling down the main page (or a long list of comments on a particular post), but I’d have to mostly agree with what you’ve said in response. I’ll have to catch the rest of what Jeff said tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday.
Thanks for the comment, Joseph. I’ve tried to organize the sidebar in a way that puts the most useful widgets on top.
I really don’t use 90% of the widgets I see in a blogger’s sidebar, mainly out of laziness. Personally, though, I like widgets that track some sort of metric, such as the Google Pagerank, Technorati rank, etc.
Yikes, my response went from comment to post territory. Will have to trackback that in later rather than leave more words in a comment response than you wrote in the post above.
As to the calendar and widgets stuff since that seems to be a direct response to your ending question, I find most of that stuff more valuable to authors than readers and think that’s better handled by a conditional template.
One can always display a different template with all the useful components to the author(s) and another to readers/visitors/SE with a one line conditional in the template. The presentation at the blogs I contribute to is an intentionally different experience.
Since the place I most read full posts is still the web (use RSS reader to skim and pick what stories to follow), I’d like to see more blog authors take a hard look at their templates and ask: is this truly useful to readers? Why should I care who the last 10 people that visited this blog is? Sure, maybe I know somebody’s picture in the list and tips me off to see who visited, but it also feels and looks a bit invasive. More importantly though, these widgets usually drain something that I value the most: time. The more time a page takes to load, the less likely I’ll wait, return and consequently read full posts and possibly write a post like I’ve done with this one and linked in or leave a comment or both.
As Joseph indicates above with his 90% non-usage comment, a lot would be cut if most bloggers/webmasters honestly performed this type of template surgery.
Another possibility would be making your tag cloud a page all its own with a link for people to follow to see the complete cloud.
The other side of this — and I’m putting on my wordpress plugin hat now — is using your tag cloud is an advertisement of sorts for your tag cloud plugin (speaking of that why doesn’t your plugin say something like “get this plugin” with a link?). In that case, I think adding some small part of it along with a link to where to download your plugin would be useful to your blogger readers who might like to adopt for their WP-powered blogs.
Many more thoughts (perhaps too many) in the ensuing post. Other readers mileage may vary.
[...] #10 Let’s begin with #10 (”blogging about blogging”), because I realized while leaving a comment on Sterling’s post that my words had eclipsed the length of his post. Fellow blogger readers, you’ve done that [...]
Agree with you on almost every point, Mr. Sterling!
Personally, I’ve:
* never used the calendar widget.
* started to dislike widgets and chicklets to death for God knows what reasons. Maybe the major reason to avoid these stuffs is my nature to dislike anything that’s being repeated over and over again in the blogosphere. The addition of JavaScripts maybe the 2nd reason to avoid Widgets. I try to avoid JavaScript as much as possible.
Adding too many external content in your blog also increases the site load time. I’d never like to disappoint my readers just ’cause an external widget server goes down.
As far as the long blogroll is concerned, I’d prefer putting the whole blogroll on a separate page and then linking it from the home page because even if you have 100 links in the blogroll, it adds lots of extra markup in the home page. I’ve always tried to care about dial-up users. They normally have a limited plan. Once they exceed the limit, the dial-up provider charges extra $$.
I think that having a ‘Top Entries’ list on the home page is really important, if you really want to attract new feed subscribers. I had a ‘More Useful Entries’ section in my old theme. Yet to add this section in my new theme though.
p.s. You should check your ‘single.php’ theme file, Mr. Sterling.. There seems to be a problem.
[...] weblog and found a really interesting topic on good blogging practice. Check out the post titled Blog gone bad. A must read if you care about your blog [...]
Excellent points, all.
Avinash, if you’re referring to my sidebar extending over the footer — yes, it is a problem, and we are working on it.
wow! this is great!
[...] Chip Camden and TDavid have written interesting posts in response to Jeff Atwood’s 13 Blog Cliches. I tend to do a lot of the stuff on Jeff’s list too. [...]