Blog Mistakes? Or Choices?

A closer look at “43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid” from Daily Blog Tips.

Yesterday, while trying desperately to catch up with the feeds I follow, I found “43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid” on Daily Blog Tips. Daniel begins the post with this:

There are several lists of web design mistakes around the Internet. Most of them, however, are the “Most common” or “Top 10” mistakes. Every time I crossed one of those lists I would think to myself: “Come on, there must be more than 10 mistakes…”. Then I decided to write down all the web design mistakes that would come into my head; within half an hour I had over thirty of them listed. Afterwards I did some research around the web and the list grew to 43 points.

His list of “mistakes” are pretty good. They include the usual bunch of design decisions that bloggers (or their template designers) make that could affect the popularity of a blog and/or its ability to generate revenue. But in looking through the list, I realized that I’m guilty of making a bunch of these “mistakes.” And although I understand the reason Daniel thinks they’re “mistakes,” I continue to do them by choice.

My “Mistakes”

While I encourage you to read Daniel’s post and get his point of view on all 43 items he lists, I’m going to take a moment or two to pick out the rules I break and explain why.

1. The user must know what the site is about in seconds.

There’s no better way to start breaking rules than to break the very first one. The majority of people who visit my site for the first time probably don’t know what the site is about within seconds. Why? Because the site is about so many things.

This is a personal choice. I decided about two years ago that I only wanted one blog. Following the rule that a serious blogger should post at least once a day, it would be impossible for me to post every day about five specific topics if I had five separate blogs. So I’ve taken the lazy way out and have just one blog with a lot of categories.

One of the ways I’ve gotten around this (or at least tried to) is by making good use of WordPress’s category feature and even going so far as to make it very easy to subscribe to a specific category feed. So if you only come here to read about blogging, you can just follow that feed (or category).

You do realize why everyone says this is so important, right? They assume that you’re trying hard to make your blog popular, probably so you can monetize it. Although I’d be thrilled if my blog started getting 10,000 hits a day, that’s not what I’m trying to do here. My goal is to journalize my life, share insight about the things I know or find interesting, and educate the readers of my books about things not specifically covered in those books. If those purposes aren’t apparent within seconds to first-time visitors — or even within weeks to repeat visitors! — well, that’s just the way it is. My choice, my decision. But I don’t think it’s a “mistake.”

5. Do not open new browser windows.

Guilty as charged. And I know that many bloggers and Web designers say this — including the usability expert, Jakob Nielsen. That made me think long and hard before I made my decision.

The rule I follow is this:

  • If the link is to another site or page on someone else’s site, I use the _blank attribute to open that URL in a new window — or, better yet, if the browser is set up to use tabs (as mine is), in a new tab.
  • If the link is to another page on my site, I usually skip the attribute so the URL opens in the same window or tab.

Why do I do this? Well, this is the way I like to browse the Web. When I see a link on an interesting site, I want to keep reading the site and check the links later. So I open the links in new tabs and, when I’m finished with the main page, view the links in their tabs — which are already loaded and waiting for me. (Understand that I access the Internet at only 512Kbps (on a good day).) This enables me to browse far more efficiently, without missing things I want to look into — and without dealing with the erratic behavior of the Back button when forms are involved. So I set up my site to work the way I’d like other sites to work.

Think about the branches of a tree. Each time you click an external link on my site, you’re going to a new branch. But the main trunk is still there. You can close the trunk and keep exploring the branch or switch back to the trunk at any time and continue exploring from there.

Well, that’s how I think about it anyway.

15. Do not break the “Back” button.

This is related to the previous item. Evidently, spawning new windows (or tabs) breaks the back button because those new windows (or tabs) don’t have anything to go back to. But I can argue that clicking an external link on my site takes you to another site and there’s no “back” on that other site.

It’s just the way I look at it, I guess.

24. Do not blend advertising inside the content.

I do break this one occasionally, but not very often. It’s usually with links to books or other products on Amazon.com (is that an ad?) or the occasional company-specific ad. I think it’s okay to do this once in a while, but the ad should definitely be related to the post content and there should not be an ad in the middle of every single post on the site.

There are a number of Web sites I stopped following because there were just too many ads — especially annoying, blinking or flashing ones.

33. Make clicked links change color.

Well, the links do change color here, but the change is not very noticeable. I think I need to work on that a bit. The reason I’m not in a big hurry to fix this is that pages change often here so what was at a link yesterday might not be the same content at that link today.

39. Include functional links on your footer.

I put this stuff in my header. I don’t see any reason not to include it in the footer as well — except that it’s pretty obvious in the header.

40. Avoid long pages.

Hey, I have a lot to say!

WordPress can be configured to display a certain number of posts on the Home page and any “archive” pages. An archive page is a category page, a date page, an author page — any page that groups one or more entries by a certain variable. The trouble is, the number of posts that appears on the Home page must be the same number that appears on the archive pages. What should that number be? I settled on 8 after trying all kinds of combinations.

My posts vary greatly in length. Some are very short — only a few sentences or paragraphs. Others are very long — 1500 words or more, with photos. I want the content area of each page to be longer than the sidebar area. But I don’t want the pages to be very long. That’s how I settled on 8.

While I understand the reason for keeping pages short, I also want to avoid the tricks required to pull off this design rule:

  • Write shorter posts. Changing the length of your post to meet a design need is an instance of the tail wagging the dog. Writers, in general, don’t like to do this. It tends to indicate that layout is more important than content. Since writers are providing content, it’s rather insulting to insinuate that what they have to say is less important than the way it appears in a Web browser window (or on a printed page).
  • Use the < --more--> tag. This is a WordPress feature that enables you to break a post into two or more pages. It has its pros and cons, which I plan to discuss in a future post. (The sad truth is, I woke up this morning thinking of the < --more-->. A more normal person would wake up thinking about breakfast or what they were going to do today.) In general, I don’t use it because I think it’s an inconvenience to readers. Why should I give my readers extra work just to keep my pages short?

My Score

So I’ve made 7 out of Daniel’s 43 listed “mistakes.” You should now understand why. Whether you agree or not is something you need to decide.

Have any thoughts about this? Don’t keep them to yourself. Use the Comments link or form to share them with other readers.

Twitter "Friendships"

Can following a person’s tweets make him a real friend?

Sometime last night or this morning — I can’t keep track with the time zone thing — Andy Piper posted a Twitter tweet with a link to an article by Clive Thompson about Twitter. Because the article reinforces something I’d mentioned in my most recent post here about Twitter, I thought I’d share it.

The key paragraph (as far as I’m concerned) from “Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense” on Wired.com is this:

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

This is pretty much I was trying to say in the introduction of my post. But I can go on to say that even though many of these people started out as strangers, reading their tweets day after day have given me a certain awareness about them that a real friend — but perhaps not a good friend — would have.

Twitter as a Way to Make Friends

I see Twitter as a way to make friends across the world. Although, I don’t ever expect to ever meet most of these people in person, there is a chance that I might actually make real friends with one or two.

For example, I’m actively seeking out interesting Twitter members who live in Arizona to follow. By following their tweets, I can get a sense of what these people are all about. If we have a lot in common, it’s easy enough to take the next step to start a real friendship. And it’s easy enough for them to respond or ignore me.

TwitterificI’m not talking instant friendships here. I’m talking about possibly months of watching tweets as part of my day. In my case, that means having Twitterific open on my Mac’s desktop and peeking at the tweets of a handful of people as they come in. I delete “friends” who really don’t seem to be on the same wavelength with me and add “friends” who might. Over time, the ones who remain on my desktop are the ones that could become real friends. If they’re in the area, why not get together for coffee or a hike or a museum trip?

It All Comes Down to Being Picky

It all comes down to using Twitter seriously, which I’ve discussed in at least one other blog post about Twitter. Use a Twitter tool (like Twitterific or some other program that selectively tracks tweets) to track only the tweets of people who interest you. Obviously, real friends should be included — if you can get them to use Twitter.

To find new people to follow, I’ll occasionally watch Twittervision and read the tweets posted in the US, especially in my area. I’ll add one or two “friends” to track for a while. I also use the Public Timeline to find interesting tweets and add corresponding Twitter members. In both cases, I limit my time to about 5 minutes — without setting a limit, either of these monitoring tools could suck hours away from your life.

My biggest problem: Most Twitter users are between 18 and 27 years old. That really shows in their posts. (Take that any way you like.) My goal is to find mature, interesting people to follow.

And, little by little, I think I’m building up a good group of Twitter “friends.”

But the question remains: will any of these people become real friends? We’ll see.

Gila Monster

My first Final Cut Express video project.

After spending three days going through a tutorial to learn Final Cut Express HD, I was ready to create my first video project. I’m sharing it with blog readers so you can see how much effort a person can expend on 25 seconds of video.

About the Project

This particular project features a Gila Monster (pronounced “heela monster”), which is a rather large lizard that can be found in the Arizona desert. If I’m lucky, I see one or two of these in a year, so they’re not exactly common. They are, like so many things in the desert, poisonous, so you don’t want to get too close. But since they’re not exactly fast and they’re definitely not aggressive, you can get photos of them in action if you have equipment with you.

On a backroad trip with Mike and some friends, we happened to come upon one croassing the road. I had my video camera with me and whipped it out to capture some pretty decent footage. This Final Cut Express project cuts out the boring shaky bits, replaces our silly comments with music, and adds opening and closing titles. This is the first in a series of short videos I hope to add to wickenburg-az.com, so make the site more interesting to visitors.

But this is also an experiment to check out video formats and Final Cut Express’s export feature. I had great success when exporting to QuickTime movie format, for iPod, and for Apple TV. But the Windows Media Player export didn’t work right at all and the AVI format was extremely poor quality, despite the file size, so I’m not going to distribute them. I just spent another few minutes using the iPod version of the file to create an e-mail version using QuickTime’s Share command. That worked best of all for the Web view of the file. Only 3.3 MB (which is smaller than the iPod version, and it looks pretty good.

Getting it Online

XHTML purists will tell you that the EMBED tag is a no-no in Web development. I think it has something to do with Internet Explorer which, for some reason, can’t interpret XHTML and CSS like the rest of the Web browsers on this planet.

So this project is also an experiment to see if the QuickTime Embed plugin for WordPress will work. If you’re reading this article shortly after I put it online and there’s no QuickTime movie below (or if the whole site is messed up), it’s because I’m trying this out and debugging. (Check in again in about 30 minutes.)

That said, here’s the movie with a Poster movie. I think I’l leave the iPod file for wickenburg-az.com distribution.

[qt:https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/GilaMonster-web.mov https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/GilaMonster-web-poster.mov 480 335]

On Notebooks and Scratchpads

Some organization/productivity tips.

When I’m working in my office, I’m sitting in front of a computer all day. Although I have three different tools for taking notes on my computer while I’m working, I always turn to pen and paper when I need to make a note. And I recently realized that that isn’t a bad thing after all.

Sure, you can use software to jot down notes as you need to, but there’s really no substitute for a notebook or scratchpad. I have both, although I prefer the notebook.

It’s usually a spiral bound notebook, the kind with page perforations so you can cleanly rip off a sheet. I keep it open on my desk to the “current” page, which is the page I last used for jotting down a note. I try hard to start a new page each time I have a series of related notes to jot down, but I don’t always succeed. Sometimes, I simply forget.

Recently, I used up all the pages in my notebook and haven’t replaced it. So I’m using a scratchpad. I make the scratch pads out of the galley pages for my Quicken books. Really. Here’s how it works. I write my Quicken book and submit it electronically as Word files. I get back edited Word files, accept or reject changes, and send them back. Then the book goes to layout. The publisher prints the galley pages and sends them to me. I mark up the pages that have problems and send them back to the publisher. Since there’s no reason to send back pages without problems — after all, why pay to ship more than you have to? — I save them. I bring them to Kwikprint here in Wickenburg and they cut them into 1/4 or 1/2 size sheets and pad them up with about 200 pages per pad with the blank side facing up. Throughout the year, I use the scratch pads in my office and house to jot down notes.

What kinds of things do I jot down? Well, one look at the notebook will reveal all. Here’s my current scratchpad (1/4 page size) by page:

  1. The phone number for the local museum (highly recommended), along with the user ID, password, and domain address for a recently created MySQL file.
  2. A list of the template files I plan to create for my series of articles about creating a WordPress Theme from scratch. (The same list appears in the first article of the series.)
  3. My ScratchpadMeasurements of content, sidebar, and page sizes, in pixels, for the WordPress theme I’m designing from scratch and writing about in the article series (see image).
  4. Another page of the same thing but with a different layout and different measurements.
  5. A list of hexadecimal codes corresponding to the colors I plan to use in the WordPress theme I’m creating.
  6. Dates for the beta and Gold Master releases of a software program I’m not allowed to talk about.
  7. Domain names for a few adventure travel sites I checked out for possible advertising of Flying M Air excursions. (They all suck.) Also the phrases Whirly Girls, instrument rating, and Part 136 jotted down during a conversation with a fellow pilot this afternoon.

What’s not listed here are the pages I don’t need anymore, the ones I’ve torn out and discarded. (Don’t worry; I have a recycle box under my desk.) That’s the beauty of notebooks and scratchpads. You can write down the information you need when you get it and discard the pages when you’re done with them. Or file the pages if you think you’ll need them in the future.

Getting Things DoneI’ve been trying hard lately to get and stay organized. I have been reading Getting Things Done by David Allen and it’s been helping. Although I think he goes to far — no, I do not need a label maker to properly file or label things — he has a lot of good ideas. And although he recommends blank, unlined paper — like the kind in your copy machine — I prefer lined notebook paper for notes I want to keep. What I like best about the notebooks is that the pages stay bound together until I’m ready to discard or file them. No loose paper scattered all over my desk, waiting for me to do something with it.

So although I still rely on iCal to keep track of appointments and schedule items, I don’t use any computer-based tool for jotting down notes. All notes are in my notebook or scratchpad (or both), where I can note things wherever I am, without having to open a program or document and use a keyboard.

After all, it only takes one hand to write with a pen.

Fighting Spam — All Kinds

How I deal with comment and pingback spam.

I start each morning pretty much the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, make a scrambled egg for my parrot, and then sit down at the kitchen table and check the comments that came into my blog overnight.

About Spam

The main thing I’m checking for each morning is comment and pingback spam. These are similar but different.

  • Comment spam is a comment that exists solely to provide one or more links to another Web site, usually to promote that site or its services, but possibly to just get links to that site to improve Google rankings. Comment spam ads nothing to the site’s value. Sometimes disguised as a guest book entry or general positive comment — for example, “Great blog! I’ll be back!” accompanied by a link or two — it simply isn’t something the average blogger should want on his or her site.
  • Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from this site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.

Lucky me: I get both.

Tools to Fight Comment Spam

Fortunately, I use both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 (many thanks again to Miraz for suggesting both of these), so the spam comments that get through their filters and are actually posted to the site are minimized. On a typical day, I might just have 3 to 5 of them. Compare that to 3,400 potential spam messages stopped by Bad Behavior in the past week and the 51,000 spam messages deleted after posting by Spam Karma in the past year since its installation. Without these two forms of protection, I’d be spending all day cleaning up spam.

Anyone who doesn’t use some kind of spam protection on a blog with open comments is, well, an idiot.

Neither program is very effective against pingback spam, although Spam Karma seems to be catching a few of them these days. Although I’m pretty sure I can set up WordPress to reject pingbacks, I like the idea of getting legitimate links from other blogs. It helps form a community. And it provides a service to my readers. For example, if I wrote an article about something and another blogger quoted my work and added his insight to it, his article might interest my readers. Having a link in my comments right to his related post is a good thing.

My Routine

So my morning routine consists of checking Spam Karma’s “Approved Comments” and marking the comments that are spam as spam. Then I go into WordPress’s Comments screen (Dashboard > Manage > Comments) and marking pingback spam as spam and deleting it.

Why do it both ways? Well, I’m concerned that if I keep telling Spam Karma that pingback spam is spam, it’ll think all pingbacks are spam. I don’t want it to do that. So I manually delete them. It only takes a minute or two, so it isn’t a big deal. If I had hundreds of these a day, I might do things differently.

The other reason I delete the pingbacks manually is because I want to check each site that’s pinging mine. I collect URLs of splogging sites and submit them periodically to Google. These sites violate Google’s Terms of Service and I’m hoping Google will either cancel their AdSense accounts or remove them from Google’s search indexing (or, preferably, both). So I send the links to Google and Google supposedly looks at them.

I’m working on a project to make creating a DMCA notice easier — almost automated — and would love to hear from anyone working on a project like that.

This morning was quiet. Only three spams to kill: one comment spam and two pingback spams. I’ll get a few more spams during the day and kill them as they arrive; WordPress notifies me via e-mail of all comments and pingbacks as they are received. (I don’t check my e-mail at the breakfast table anymore.)

Do you have a special way to deal with comment or pingback spam? Don’t keep it a secret. Leave a Comment below.