In preparing for revamping Vox and She-blog, I read a lot about blogging and what I should do to improve my blog and site. I’ve learned a lot and hopefully my future blogging will reflect that. There are some obvious problems with my old site and my old blog on blogspot – I’ve just never really bothered with them. The coding and design on them suck. I never took the time to deal with validation, cross-browser, or monitor size issues. When blogger went to the new blog format, I could never get my site to look right and I didn’t want to learn how because it was so annoyingly complicated. Whatever. It’s a new era.
In addition to these obvious mistakes, I learned about some other blogging conventions that I violate. It’s funny that there are now “rules” about how to blog and what makes a good blog. I didn’t even know what a blog was when I started doing it. It just seemed like something fun and cool to do. Of course, as a rhetorician, I know the most important rule is audience-centeredness, but I never really defined an audience as anyone other than myself, the occasional friend or student, and perhaps whoever else stumbled onto my site. I did decide early on that I didn’t want my blog to be a journal with a heavy personal focus, but I do talk about my life all the time.
After reading two sites on blogging mistakes (Lorelle on WordPress and Coding Horror), I’ve made myself a promise to be better. Here are some cliches and mistakes I make regularly:
1. My banner was fucked up. I know, I know. I should have fixed it ages ago. In addition, it’s unnecessarily huge. My newer banner is smaller, though not by much.
2. Lack of topic focus — I don’t really have a niche. But…this is a personal blog. Do I really need one?
3. Stealing content – Although I only occasionally actually steal bandwidth from someone, I do just repost copied and pasted material from other posts. And usually without even adding my own opinion.
4. The mindless link echo chamber – Yes, I’m very guilty of that. I frequently just post links to somewhere without adding any content. I also just post links to the same old shit everyone else is posting links to, like HuffPo, etc. So I contribute nothing original. Bad blogging form.
5. I don’t post regularly and I apologize for it all the time. This is considered to be tacky.
6. I never bothered to clean up the comment spam on my blog.
7. Some of my entries used long paragraphs without breaks in text or without pagebreaks.
8. Apparently posting what you’re reading or listening to is passé.
9. SEO, SEO, SEO — Search engine optimization is all the thing now. While I’m not sure how much I care about this issue, I do think I could be doing a few things better. I use “anchor text” (what you anchor your link to) poorly. I always just use “here” or “there” or whatever, instead of anchoring the link to something sensible. I use ridiculous and uninformative post titles, like “bleh” or “nothing much.” They don’t reveal much about the post content, they show up stupidly on searches, and they don’t really speak kindly about what I have to say. I don’t use tags (blogger doesn’t have ‘em) or metatags. My site was not set up for feeds very clearly or for “‘bots” to crawl and all that crap.
10. I often post just for the sake of posting. Sort of like posting a status on Facebook. I mean, really, who cares?
