Here are 50 very useful Tips to Unclutter Your Blog. These are the ones of which I’m guilty:
3. Prune your categories list. Categories perform an important navigational function but their use is limited when you have a lot of categories. The longer your list, the less likely readers are to go through it. Prune your categories down to at most 15 or 20.
8. Remove top commenter widgets. I have heard plenty of stories about people spamming blogs with dozens of comments in order to make the list and get a backlink. This undermines community more than it adds to it. If your top commenters have made only a few comments then this can also undermine social proof.
10. Put your blogroll on a separate page. You can link to the blogroll or links page from your sidebar. If a reader is interested in seeing your recommended sites they will be willing to travel to a page where they can be easily viewed and returned to.
20. Remove ’spam blocked’ counts. Do your readers really care how many spam comments Akismet or any other service has blocked? Akismet already comes with every copy of Wordpress that is downloaded. It doesn’t really need more advertising.
29. Remove time-stamps. Unless the reader is from your state or city and knows it then time-stamps lose all meaning. You might write a post at 7am but in the next state it could be 8am. In another country, it might be 8pm. The time of day has little meaning on the internet.
44. Prune under-performing ads. If an ad is making you next to nothing then remove it. This will strengthen the message of those ads you’re displaying that are working.
Only 6 is pretty good, I think. I’ll get to them when I get to them.
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So I was chatting with Riz and Jason yesterday at “Wing Night,” and Jason started talking about Martin Luther or something, and apparently it was a pretty common thing to nail announcements to church doors. I thought he was just being impertinent or something when he did that.
Anyhoo, I think it would have been funny if someone starting posting there regularly, like it were a blog. Only he wouldn’t know it was a blog, because blogs didn’t exist back then. He would write things like, “hay guys, check out this cool painting I found of a cat playing piano” and then spend 5 pages complaining about how the guy at Microplay refuse to sell him the new release of the hoop and stick.
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So the beau just put up a bird feeder about half an hour ago and he’s been walking to the window to look out and see if there are any birds and when he doesn’t see any, he comments about how he wants birds to come. I remarked that it was like he had just blogged the bird feeder and he was anxiously going back to check for bird comments and he got annoyed. I guess blogging is just too “real” for him.
Inothernews, I think there should be a Facebook group for people who are looking for housemates in Kingston. Also, there should be an easy right-clicking way for people to add words to the Firefox 2.0 spellchecking dictionary.
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Whenever I refer to a page within this site I always use a relative link, removing the http://www.guzzlingcakes.com bit and leaving only a slash (”/images/apatosaurus.jpg,” for example). It’s great for backwards compatibility, but not so good when someone’s reading my blog from a feed reader (because the link changes to http://feed-reader-url.com/images/apatosaurus.jpg, which doesn’t exist).
I just made a quick wordpress plugin to change the links in my feeds to absolute URLs, to avoid this problem. Feel free to download, if you like: relative-to-absolute.zip
Comment if there are any problems and I’ll fix them.
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I just checked my XHTML compatibility, fixed a few things, and it’s now back to being free of ampersands without the amp; part and scripts outside of p-tags. The problem seemed to be FeedList, which is a plugin for Wordpress that publishes RSS feeds (not all xml, unfortch) on your page. I made a few changes to the plugin at my other site a few months ago, but forgot to do the same thing over here. Now my site validates! Here are the changes I made (in case they’re useful to someone else).
Within the rssLinkListBuilder() function, near the end, is something like this:
if($show_description) {
$rssList .= $before . $thisLink . $thisDescription . $after . "n";
} else {
$rssList .= $before . $thisLink . $after . "n";
}
Replace that code with the following:
if($show_description) {
$rssList .= $before . str_replace("&", "&", $thisLink) .
str_replace("&", "&", $thisDescription) .
$after . "n";
} else {
$rssList .= $before . str_replace("&", "&", $thisLink) .
$after . "n";
}
I usually only have problems with ampersands but you can generate an array of weird characters using some random php function (I’ve got this for a feed generator I wrote so if you want the script, comment and I’ll send it to you) and use ereg or preg replace, it’s all a matter of personal taste.
A bit below that you’ll find the following:
} else {
$rssList .= '<a href="#" title="No Items Found
there may be a problem with the feed at: '.
$rss_feed_url.'">Empty List</a>';
}
Change it to this:
} else {
$rssList .= $before . '<a href="#" title="No Items Found
there may be a problem with the feed at: '.
$rss_feed_url.'">Empty List</a>' . $after;
}
It should validate now!
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The “popularity contest” plugin for Wordpress is the buggiest piece of garbage I’ve ever seen. I installed it on this blog and it worked, but then suddenly it started doing all this weird stuff to my admin system. I tried installing it on my other blog and it didn’t work at all. Support is also garbage; at least four people have listed the same problems as I have and none of them have gotten any responses.
Turns out it’s a problem with mysql; the plugin directly accesses the mysql database without an abstraction layer, and of course it uses queries that are dependent on a weird, older version of mysql. So there’s no hope of it working, ever.
I’m rather disappointed, but I’ll find another plugin that hopefully does the same thing.
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I set up a little code snippet on my server that lets me mark blog posts that I find interesting and publish a feed of my favourite blogs. I’ve been wanting to integrate this with an RSS aggregator so I could preferentially check out the blogs that are most likely to post something I’m interested in, but I couldn’t find a way to do that without writing my own aggregator. Most online readers (and I wanted an online reader so I could maintain the read/unread status of posts across the four different computers I use) will let you import OPML but won’t let you include dynamic information (like ratings and such). So I had no idea what to do until I found reBlog.
reBlog is an aggregator that you host yourself, which means it’s an aggregator that I can mold to my own specifications. It’s got an API so you can write plugins for it, and I believe I will turn my little snippet into a reBlog plugin and then expand its features a bit.
I’m sure this is a common problem for web-based feed readers, but I wish I could view these feeds with their intended formatting. No biggie, of course. Not even sure how you’d do that sort of thing. Perhaps I’ll just play with the css a bit so I don’t have to look at grey all the time. I want my RSS aggregator to be AS GIRLY AS POSSIBLE, THANK YOU. That means PINK AND ORANGE. And maybe some YELLOW.
(reBlog found via Lifehacker, which has one of my highest blog ratings.)
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