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Browser-Driven Blog Design Comparisons
Mar 19th
I must thank Emm in London for the inspiration for this post. Without getting too far afield, this is a perfect example of why any pertinent comment is a valid comment – they don’t have to be lengthy. In my post entitled, Blogger in Draft Tests New Template Designer, she commented simply that, “I found it buggy and that it wouldn’t respond in Internet Explorer. I will give it a try in Firefox when I have more time.” This caused me to respond with my own observation and as they say, “the rest is history.” Now, let’s get to our discussion on Browser-Driven Blog Design.
Browser Comaparison from TopTenREVIEWS
- The Good News: There are many quality web browsers from which to choose.
- The Bad News: There are many quality web browsers from which to choose.
This is an interesting predicament for any blogger, but it gets more complicated because browsers must be evaluated through two different lenses. One is how it performs for you when you visit blogs, update your own, and generally scour the Internet for information. The other is through the eyes of your visitors: how do you design your blog to be friendly to say, the Top 10 browsers evaluated by TopTenREVIEWS when you don’t even know which browser is used by your readers? Before we get to how you can determine the most popular browser in use by your visitors, l always like to serve up a Wikipedia perspective.
Wikipedia's Reliable In-Depth Review
Regular readers know my fondness for citing Wikipedia as a way to set a baseline of information. In this example, Wikipedia provides an historical comparison of web browsers. You can see that not only in this graphic, but the entire article, web browsing has some history – and in some cases some baggage. This is not meant to be a debate on corporate politics, anti-trust laws, or the merits of individual selections, but it is a commentary on being informed when you choose a browser or code for it.
Now, back to how you can at least see the most popular browser(s) in use by your readers.
If you are in the least bit curious about how your site performs or interested in knowing more about your visitors, you should be using Google Analytics. I won’t take the time here to tout the merits, except for a specific section, germane to this topic: visitors and their browsers.
When you log into your Dashboard, you will see an option for Visitors. This provides a wealth of information on your readers, their location, and characteristics.
Select Visitors to begin to look into the characteristics of your loyal visitors. For the purpose of this post, take a look at their Browsers.
I can quickly see that over 82% of the visitors to the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit use Firefox. For me, I don’t need to concern myself much beyond Firefox users. Fortunately, since I use Firefox most of the time myself, my situation is fairly simple. But two lessons need to be learned from this exercise:
- Pay attention to the “critical mass” of visitors – they are your bread and butter, and
- Check this on a regular basis. As your blog grows in visibility, the makeup of your visitors may change as well. Adjust your strategies as necessary.
Just as a blog’s content drives the discussion, the browsers in use should drive the design. Give the customer what they want, and they will continue to come back.
Dave
Battling Blogger’s Block
Jan 5th
Custom News Section Created
Wikipedia calls Writer’s Block “a condition, associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task in hand. At the other extreme, some ‘blocked’ writers have been unable to work for years on end, and some have even abandoned their careers.”
One could argue that the blogging equivalent could be called Blogger’s Block.
We’ve all encountered it at one point or another. Fatigue (mental or physical), focus directed elsewhere (family or work), or just not in the mood. Sometimes we can fight through it; sometimes not. In the past, I’ve written about Google Reader as a convenient tool for keeping track of all the blogs you wish to follow on a regular basis. Setting it to show just the new posts is an excellent way to spoon-feed yourself with the new content posted by your favorite bloggers. More to the point of this post, it also provides for a “sampler” of topics. This sampler could be the tool to jog your memory and inspire you to break through “Blogger’s Block.”
But there is another Google tool (go figure) that can act as another Blogger’s Blog Jogger: Google News. If you’ve ever clicked there from Google’s main page, you know the collection of news stories in a number of categories that is updated constantly. In one way, this information overload does nothing for inspiring me for a topic.
Unless I use some of its features.
Custom News Section Displayed
Google News allows you to create a Custom News Section for any search term so that you can display a custom view with news stories on your topic of choice. For example, another blog of mine called Energication, I blog about renewable energy and its implications for K-12 education. As part of that, I have a specific interest in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. So, I have created a Custom News Section for PHEV. Now, I simply click on my PHEV collection and have the current and most relevant news stories served up on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
You can set up any number of Custom News Sections based on the subjects in which you are most interested. What I like about this approach to creativity is that while reading other blogs is enjoyable, reading other’s work applies their “lenses” to the topic. My viewing more “neutral” news stories, I get to see the topic through the eyes of the reporter. A very different perspective. Sometimes, just a certain collection of topic titles gets my attention, allowing me to get on a horse about some issue.
It’s very easy to use. Simply enter a search term in your Google News view. When your custom page is displayed, click on the link at the bottom of the page to “Add a custom section for [search term] to Google News.”
Creativity, perspectives, insights – and the tools to foster all of them – is the combination that makes for effective blogging.
I hope you find this useful.
Dave
Blog Review: Caledonian Comment
Dec 31st
Blogging is truly an international pastime. My analytics consistently show visitors to the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit from a large number of countries and continents. Many of those blogs center around topics from crafts to dogs and cats to family to actual serious topics. This review is about a blog from the U.K. that takes a look at those serious topics facing Britain (and the rest of the world for that matter) and attacks them with an irreverent tone that is intoxicating, thought provoking and down right entertaining.
As I often do, I’ll begin with a definition. Wikipedia defines Caledonian as “a geographical term used to refer to places, species, or items in or from Scotland, or particularly the Scottish Highlands.” With my wife born in Cambridge and her mother in Liverpool, I have a certain connection and deep fondness for the British. That makes this review even more enjoyable for me. A visit to the Lake District (nearly as far north as you can go in England before you get to Scotland) a number of years ago seared into my soul the intense beauty of that region. Wikipedia’s definition brings back fond memories.
Why do I share that personal perspective? It is because of the irony between that beautiful definition and the seriousness of the issues explored in the Calendonian Comment. One such serious issue is the recent attempted bombing of an airliner destined for Detroit from Amsterdam. It is unfortunate that the picture of the accused bomber is currently the top post. It is common in my Free Blog Reviews to show an image of the front page of the blog under review. Instead, I would like to also share a more appropriate image, taken from the Background page. Truly a better representation of the fine work contained there rather than that of a terrorist’s picture.
The author cited on the Background Page is only referred to as Caledonian Jim.
To give you a sense of what you’ll get when you visit, let me share a few excerpts from the Background page: “with cutting satire and withering abuse aimed at as many deserving victims as possible… to enrich your internet experience with cynical world-weary observations designed to prick the balloons of the pompous…” You get the picture.
One final quote: “As far as the author of this blog is concerned, all politicians are deserving of equal contempt.” I’m beginning to really like Jim.
Caldonian Jim serves up a consistent and thoughtful message. With the published archives going back to May 2008, the numbers show that he has shared his perspectives at least every other day. Some months, it is virtually daily. His topics range from the terrorist mentioned earlier, to the growing number of British citizens having trouble paying their fuel bills, to the irresponsible growth in wheel clamping licensees (some areas of the U.S. call this a “boot”) to climate change to his perspectives on couples being happier when sharing household duties. Jim’s quote is priceless: “Marvelous – I’ve tried to avoid doing the dishes for bloody years and now this!”
Jim provides excellent photos to accompany his posts and uses many of the same blog promotion and community tools as I do. He has a considerable number of widgets along the right side, but being contained in one panel, they are not imposing nor distracting. Regular readers know my frustration with too many distractions on a page. His work just fine there. His template layout is simple and very straightforward.
In most reviews, I have a number of suggestions for the budding blogger. In this case, I honestly have to say that I am stretching to provide some constructive feedback. In his template he seems to nearly have it all:
- Welcome message with a quote from one of The Lads: check
- Last 10 Posts: check
- Monthly Archives (quite impressive post counts!): check
- Last visitors comments: check
- Blogroll: check
- A very interesting countdown to the next post (well done): check
The only suggestions I might make relates to a thought about email protocol – single topic messages. Caledonian Jim is quite prolific in his posts, including photos liberally. The two frustrations I have is that posts contain multiple topics and there isn’t any sort tag cloud to look for certain topics. Jim takes the time and care to assign quite a number of appropriate tags to his posts, so there is already a significant categorization infrastructure in place. Personally, I would like to see a single post per day, each one on a specific topic.
The Caledonian Comment is a wonderful read. I would be the first to admit that in spite of my British connection, his content will connect best with Brits. However, his topics are frequently global in nature and exceedingly well written (#1 axiom for an excellent blog.) It would be worth anyone’s time to use his blog as a taste of Britain and the world. Forget about the BBC.
I will continue to drop by to get my British “fix” and will look for perspectives involving the Lake District. Who knows, I might even join in the fray.
Dave
CAPTCHA to Save SPAM Editing
Dec 23rd
Captcha Catches Crap
Akismet does a fine job. In Amazing Akismet SPAM Fighting, I explained that with a simple WordPress plugin, I was saved from significant comment moderation from our fiends friends, the spammers. Since that post, I’ve avoided thousands of SPAM hits, thanks to Akismet.
But that still requires an occasional review of the SPAM folder to 1) make sure there aren’t any false positives (and there really aren’t many!), and 2) to just clean it out.
Spammers (and their ‘bots) are relentless, so I decided to add another line of defense: CAPTCHA.
Wikipedia defines CAPTCHA as “a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer.” Man, that is what we need to fight SPAM!
With CAPTCHA displays random characters in an odd, graphical manner, that prevents Internet ‘bots from reading them. Humans can easily discern the characters, enter them into the box and continue. In this case, allow a blog comment to be entered.
The term CAPTCHA means ”Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” Follow the wiki link above for more about the science behind the magic.
There are many CAPTCHA plugins available for WordPress. The I chose is SI CAPTCHA for WordPress. I like the colors. :-)
With this new defensive maneuver against SPAM, it comes with a thank you to all of The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit readers. It does force you to enter a few extra characters to enter a comment, but it saves me considerable non-value added time. I appreciate your indulgence.
Dave
PageRank as a Measurement Tool
Aug 9th
Posted by Dave in Uncategorized
1 comment
PR Checker Badges
Recently, I offered to provide free blog reviews. I am very pleased to say that the response has been great. I have several in the works and will be posting the next one soon. Thank you again. Where appropriate, I’ve been showing that blog’s Google PageRank (TM) as a way to further define their success. Since this is a great tool for getting a quick read on how Google sees your blog (or anyone else’s in which you are interested), I decided to place the tool here for your convenience.
What is PageRank, you say? Let me explain.
Many of you already have a badge on your blogs showing your PageRank, but you may not know what drives the number. First, there are many sites that measure and provide statistics. The one I use, PR Checker, is simple and has the best looking selection of badges.
Let’s start with how Google describes it. After all, it’s their trademarked and patented tool. (In the spirit of full disclosure, notice the TM above for every reference on my site.) Google says,
“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.”
Of course, it is much more complex that this, but in essence, “the higher the ranked sites that link to your site, the higher your PageRank.”
As I often do, I turn to our friends at Wikipedia to dig deeper. This entry is about all the detail I care to consider – or serve up. If you have trouble sleeping at night, I’m sure you can find even more detailed descriptions on the web.
A while back, I posted about the value of relationships in a post comparing online and offline businesses. This is probably the number one piece of advice I could give. Visit blogs, engage in the topics, provide clear perspectives, make your visit there valuable, and they will reciprocate. A relationship is built, a link back may ensue and you’ve just added some PageRank juice to your site.
Dave