Blogging Pet Peeves

La Shawn Barber posted an outstanding blog about:

Blogging Pet Peeves
Listed in no particular order are things I don’t like about blogs and blogging:

1. Bloggers who trackback to a post on this blog but fail to link to this blog in their post.
   
   Rule of thumb: If you trackback to another blogger’s post, you must link to that blogger’s site in your post. I’d guess that 90 percent of the blogosphere would agree that this is highly irritating. What is the rationale? By leaving a trackback, you’re alerting the blog host and readers that you’re writing about the same topic. The blog host follows the trackback expecting to see what you wrote about his post.

   I completely agree with LaShawn about people leaving a trackback that does not link to them. There are three related Pet Peeves of mine

   • I hate it when a blogger quotes me but fails to leave a trackback so that I can know I was quoted.
   • I hate it when a blogger does not provide me with the ability to leave a trackback. I hate to quote someone without leaving a TrackBack, but if they don't give me the ability, I can't very well leave one. Some don't know how to enable TrackBacks (I helped one new blogger get set up with HaloScan trackback), but some have disable TrackBacks because of TrackBack Spam (this may be what LaShaws is upset about, and some don't allow either comments or trackbacks - they expect you to read their thoughts, but don't give you a way of indicating it when you agree or disagree with them
   • The one that ticks me off the most is a site that supposedly allows trackbacks, but when you capture the URL and do the trackback, it gets errors. PowerLine is one site with a bad trackback.

   (Update: It’s also about reciprocity. When you leave a trackback here, readers follow it to your blog. In turn, your readers follow the link on your blog to mine. )
2. Online news sites that don’t link to blogs mentioned in a story.
3. High-traffic bloggers who forget to link to my blog or mistakenly link to a different blog in a post where my blog is the subject.
4. Bloggers who write long posts about why they have no time to blog.
5. Bloggers who write about their latest illness, right down to the details of an infection and physical description of a rash.
6. Commenters who respond to a post without actually reading the whole post, or if they have read it, the comment doesn’t reflect it.
7. People who leave off-topic comments on a post to tell me they just e-mailed me.
8. Bloggers whose posts are mainly complaints against other bloggers.
9. Bloggers who don’t include any biographical information about themselves. Even if blogging anonymously, you can still supply basic, non-indentifying information.
10. Bloggers who either don’t list contact information or make it difficult to find.

This post will be updated as I think of other things I don’t like.

Update II: The Anchoress has ditched Blog*Spot! Visit her new WordPress home. And update your blogrolls.

Update III (4/10): A trackback is simply a way to communicate with another blogger. I will refer to a third-party trackback system called Simpletracks because each blog or commenting platform (HaloScan, WordPress, Movable Type, etc.) has a different method for tracking back to posts.

Let’s say you’re blogging about this post and you want me and the readers to know about it. If you click on “Comments/Trackbacks” and scroll to the end, you’ll see this: The URI to TrackBack this entry is:
http://lashawnbarber.com/archives/2005/04/09/peeves/trackback/.

URI is short for Uniform Resource Identifier. This is more information than you need to know to trackback, but in case you’re curious…

When using Simpletracks, you will need to copy and paste the trackback URI above (which is different with each post), the name of your blog, your post title, post URI, and an excerpt of the post, and put them in the appropriate place, and hit “Send Ping.”

Your blog will ping my blog, and the trackback will show up in “Comments/Trackbacks” like this:

The ten habits of highly irritating bloggers
According to La Shawn Barber, anyway: 1. Bloggers who trackback to a post on this blog but fail to link to this blog in their post. I’m usually pretty good about…

Trackback by dustbury.com — 04.09.05 @ 3:06 pm

Clicking on “dustbury.com” will take you directly to the post where this post is mentioned. In WordPress, trackback entries are truncated and post titles are in bold. Depending on which blog publishing system you use, trackbacking will be slightly different. For instance, Movable Type automatically pings URIs in the post, so it’s unnecessary to enter URIs manually. In WordPress (version 1.2.2), I have to copy and paste trackback URIs just below the post. If you’re using HaloScan, you have to go to the site to send a trackback.

Trackbacking sounds more complicated than it should. The concept is very simple.

Usually I just quote a few lines of a blogger's post, but this one is so good I am going to post the entire thing, and not just in my primary blog, but I am also evaluating several blogging packages for an article in next month's I/O Port Newsletter and I am going to post it in each of them, because when the readers of that article check out the sample sites I posted, I want to be sure they read her thoughts. I will only TrackBack the post from my main site, so as not to clutter up her TrackBack list with a bunch of duplicate posts, but I will TrackBack the posts on the evaluation blog packages to my post, if any one wants to see them.