Blog Etiquette & Irritations

Danny Carlton blogged 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)

   Failing to do this is called TrackBack Spam, and it is bad). One thing which I would add is the converse of this point, i.e. if you do quote something on another blog, you should link to that post, so your reader will be able to see the quote in context, and you should do a trackback so the quoted blogger will know he has been quoted, and so his readers can see what you thought about his post.

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.

   Good point. I sometimes make my titles short, so that they will just take one line on my right column, but I am not sure this is a good idea.

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.

   bpnews.com is Butane-Propane News. I suspect my good friend meant bpnews.org or bpnews.net both of which are SBC Baptist Press News, although I did not see the story he referred to (something was wrong with their advanced search capability)

   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.

   This is something I really agree with, and something I try to do. In fact I not only passed on the three links Danny had in his post, but added a couple of others, in case my readers were interested in pursuing the subject to a greater degree. Hyperlinking is the basis of the internet, and one should provide links to everything they can to aid their readers interested in learning more about something

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.

   While I will agree with Danny, I would add that on all graphics you should include a height and width spec so that the browser will reserve space for the graphic even if it does not have it loaded yet, allowing readers on a dial up connection to see the words even before the graphics load

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

   ROF,L. But his point is well taken. Any time you quote from someone you should link to them, and you should also blog roll blogs you frequently quote from. This is something I have been remiss at doing, but something I plan to do soon.