Blog Etiquette & Irritations

Janette Stripling at Common Sense Run Wild has a post asking...

Blog readers, do you have any suggestions as to what would make your surfing time more pleasant? Now is your chance to be heard, er, read.

I posted the following, and thought it deserved to be reposted here.

1. Don't ping unless you provide a link in your blog post (you'd be surprised how many bloggers don't do this)

2. (Sorry, I'm sometimes guilty of this as well) Make your title descriptive of the story. This is really handy for those who read blogs via newsreaders and aggregators that show just the title as a link. I've always thought James Taranto's witty titles were cool, but I realize now that it leaves some readers not knowing what the post is about.

3. Do some leg work and dig up as an original source as you can. For example this morning I found a story about the various growth of different churches on Religious News Service that was attributed to the Baptist Press, so I hunted down the story at bpnews.com. It referenced a National Council of Churches report, so I hunted that down. Not only did I get tons more info, but was able to use the original source.

4. Provide a spellchecker for people who leave comments (see SpelChek.com)

5. Move slow loading stuff to the bottom of your template. Sometimes it's hard to find which pics or blogrolls load slow, but it is annoying to sit and wait for a page to load, when it's so easy to rearrange the various stuff on a page to allow the more important stuff to load first. There are usually two divs on the html for a blog page (sometimes three). The main one that contains the actual entries should be before the div that contains the slower loading stuff. Even if it means making your right hand column a mile long, your readers will appreaciate it.

6. ...and finally the most important thing any blogger can do...is link to my blog: JackLewis.net

Posted by Danny Carlton at May 31, 2005 09:30 AM