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Blog Checklist

by Dave McAwesome

Contents:

Holy underwear, a lot of you folks don't know what the hell you're doing. Don't take this as a personal attack. Look at it for what it is: some angry advice about how to avoid common pitfalls from someone who actually earns money within the publishing industry. If it pisses you off, then that's just a bonus for me. Consider it revenge for all the garbage blogs I've had to wade through just to get to the good ones. Remember, publishing, be it in print or on the web, is a visual medium. Content has to be married to presentation, but unfortunately a lot of you got eloped in a Vegas chapel and rushed to annul the next morning. Now, you can blame it on the Jaegermeister, or jump aboard the Responsibility Train and do some more conventional matchmaking.
(Marriage metaphor status: exhausted.)

The first thing to read
Have you crammed so many banners, ads and splash images that all you see when loading the page is...chaos? Flashy graphics are nice and all, but I've seen too many pages where the main graphic takes up the entire screen and then you have to scroll down for the text. Worse, I've seen pages cluttered with ads and blinking buttons and the text is waaaaaaaaaaaaay at the bottom. Your blogging Web site should show your blog. The first thing I want to see when I load your page is your entry for the day. A title image is fine. I like to know where I am and what your blog is called. A single ad banner? Okay. The clutter factor is still at a minimum. Now we should be getting to your blog. Put the ads and buttons and flashy graphics in a side column. Draw my eye first to your latest entry. If you don't care about your blog entry and you WANT me to look first at your ads, then you are not doing a blog. You have made a lame-ass ad page. Congratulations. I will not be returning to your page, and neither will most viewers.

Readability
Let's see, lime green background and lemon yellow font color? Yikes. I'm hittin me the back button. Life is short, folks. And we can't be burning our eyes out trying to decipher some crazy-ass blog. If you have a dark background, use a light text color. If you have a light background, use a dark text color. See how easy that is? Now that we can read your entries, we might be better encouraged to comment on them.

Vintage 1993 Web Crap
Let's see, you've got a counter, animated gifs and a repeating flame graphic on your site? You're livin in the past, man. Worse, those things sucked way back then. They still suck now. They're not wine. They don't get better with age, stupid.

Itsy Font Size
So, you've decided to use an itsy bitsy font size. Way to go. Hey, do you know what sound your head makes when it's smacked with a wet towel? Want to find out? Keep using your microscopic font. Thanks. Now I suffer from chronic eye strain and pounding headaches. And we both know what sound your head makes when it's smacked with a wet towel: schlwap!

A Million Ads
Look, either write or go home. Stop cramming your page with a million ads. You're probably not the web superstar you think you are. If you truly get like 30,000 unique visitors every month, okay, then those ads might be worth it. But most blogs don't. You can't allow yourself to be suckered by these "make a gazillion dollars from your blog" scams. Write or go home. You'd rather be an ad salesman? Fine. You're now a faceless, talentless piece of human detritus who deserves nothing but contempt. Salesmen are a dime a dozen. Congratulations on your newfound anonymity. (By the way, when I said "30,000 unique visitors" earlier, I meant exactly that: unique visitors, not hits. And thusly we segue to...)

Misinterpreting Hits
This isn't as bad as the others, but when it feeds into ego, that's when I get out the whupping stick. Hits are different than unique visitors. Most hit counters are useless. Every time I refresh your page, you get a hit. Sometimes, hit counters count each image on your page that loads. So that could be dozens of hits per visit (or possibly per refresh). That's useless. I've seen a lot of bloggers boasting, "I've just started and I get thousands of hits every month. That must be because I'm so popular and people love me." No, it isn't. Most of those hits are you refreshing your own goddamn page. The true measure of Web site traffic is the "unique visitors" stat. Otherwise, you're just fellating yourself.

Content
Sweet Zachariah, please stop with the "I'm bored now" and "I had a thought in the shower but forgot it now" posts. I have no idea who I'm referencing when I say "sweet Zachariah," but I'm pretty sure he's pissed about it too. I can't stress this enough: You are NOT the only person on the planet who has ever had a thought in the shower and forgot it later. That is such a mundane phenomenon, that it no longer needs to be remarked upon by a "bored now" kinda writer. Maybe the reason you're bored is you don't DO anything with your life other than blog and comment on other people's blogs (and do both poorly, I might add). Step away from the monitor once in a while, and you might actually have some worthwhile content to put up.

Please, people, worry less about "I hope my blog is sooooooo popular and people will love me and fill the empty, soul-crushing void in my life," and just focus on writing decent content that won't make me hate you.

Thus concludes the McAwesome Checklist for Avoiding Crappy Blogness.

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