13 Things I don’t like In Your Blog

This is the first time I’m writing a post like this; basically I hate criticizing and telling people their mistakes, but one of my friend asked me to visit his blog and advise him about the things which I want to amend on his blog or which are the things needs improvement.  Frankly speaking a good blog design speaks a lot about the blog and the blogger; this is the first impression which some time helps glue your visitor to invert little more articles on your blog.

I take this opportunity to pull this question further and try to explain which are the things irritate me while reading a blog and I hate to see them on any blog.

1. When it’s not easy to NAVIGATE on your blog because you don’t have a navigation bar. I need to hit the back button in order to go back to your homepage.

2. When there is one blog post on display and you don’t even have a RECENT POSTS widget installed.

3. When your ABOUT ME page says “this is sample page, you can edit or delete this page”. ( Don’t hide from me, I won’t bite)

4. When I make a COMMENT on your blog and a message appears “your comment awaits moderation by administrator”. Why awaits for moderation, haven’t you heard about Akismat Plugin, CAPTCHA or for god sake search for any other better option if you wish but don’t chuck me away from communicating with your blog.

5. When I literally struggle to find where is the post content as you filled it with flashy ADS around, there are only four lines of content fitted with 300×250 AdSense Ad below and above.

6. When I just arrived at your blog a few second back and a pop up window appears requesting me to sign up for your BLOG FEED SUBSCRIPTION BOX by e-mail, hey I don’t even haven’t read a single post on your blog yet, and you are begging , Please forgive me I close that window and wish to disappear with that.

7. When a hell lot of things going on your blog SIDEBAR, you don’t want me to concentrate on your main content, aren’t you? Its stuffed fully like a Hamburger

8. When you display your posts based on CATEGORY and I can’t figure out which is the latest one.

9. Are you seriously writing a blog post or you are an essay writer and by accident become a blogger (or trying your hands at blogging?). Means your BLOG POSTS ARE TOO LONG.

10. Your HEADER Tag line (still) says “Just another WordPress blog”.

11. When I can’t see a TOP COMMENTATOR WIDGET installed on your blog (it’s unfair but I’m helpless, I visit only those blogs which have top commentators widget in place. Sorry)

12. When I like post but can’t see any SOCIAL MEDIA Support Button to spread love.

13. When I can’t see a Blog ARCHIVE PAGE to see since when you are in blogsphere.

These are some basic things that a reader/blogger looks in a blog, so if you have any above bugs in your blog then I request you to please make it good.

Image Courtesy : fo.ol

How Do Ideas Come To You?

So how you convert a modest request into an interesting idea and adapt it to build a website?

One day “this guy” got an MSN message from his colleague with a link to a YouTube Video, followed by a verbal request- “But don’t look at the description or comments, they’re spoilers”.

That was enough for “this guy” to convert this humble request into a website. He created nospoiler.com where you can watch YouTube Video without comments, Descriptions, ads or anything, just only the YouTube Video. Its not that he made something great but it’s something to be appreciated.

Like This Video Here.

How To Build A Google Freindly Site ?

Remember a few days back Google gave us a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) guide for webmasters. Now that guide helps us understanding the much hyped SEO stuff.

To help us developing a “Google friendly” site, google webmaster help Group has come up with a 30 slides presentation to show you how to host a better site.

You can download this presentation from HERE

Or Watch video presentation HERE.

Twitter Poll – How Much You Would Like to Pay for Using WordPress

I fall prey to twitter mania, I’ve been watching from quite some time every one tweeting tweets at twitter. Problogger Darren Rowse advocate the use of this valuable service and can’t resist being additive to it, he is so obsessed with this new phenomenon that he has dedicated one blogging site of his giving twitter tips to users. The best thing which I like about twitter is this whole “Twitter Poll” thing. I had seen so many times at john Chow’s and Shoemoney’s blog, various poll conducted by these bloggers and lots of twitter user tweeting their opinion on a variety of issues.

To start with I ask my follower that “WordPress is an open source blogging software, but if they ask to pay to use WordPress then how much they would like to pay?’

As am not a hot shot bloggers only few twitter users responded to my opinion call.  But i was more curious to present this on my blog rather then looking for plenty of responses, then the question was; how to integrate these twitter’s tweets into a WordPress blog post? One more time I am very thankful to truly god sent john Chow who comes to my rescue and guides me how I can integrate twitters tweets in a blog post in a more professional way.

Bloggers Rules The Internet

Let’s get down and discuss some stats about blogging. Statistics published by Technorati were interesting and encouraging for bloggers. Good news, blogsphere has maximum readership. Look at the figures.

comScore MediaMetrix (Aug. 2008)

• Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
• Facebook: 41.0 million
• MySpace 75.1 million
• Total internet audience 188.9 million

So the ultimate truth is that blogs are ruling the internet at present, what say.

Now let’s try to drill down the entire blogsphere further from the eyes of Technorati.

From the above figures what I can figure out is that not all the bloggers that enters into blogsphere are serious bloggers, the entire blogsphere ruled by 10 million bloggers out of the sum of 133 Millions. I’m impressed.

Make Money Online

It’s true that bloggers are making money online with blogging; it is important and interesting to see what type of ads being displayed by bloggers.

Here is the Graph showing various sort of advertising mode used by bloggers

There are only 24% bloggers who don’t want to display any sort of ads on their blogs exactly the same percentage of bloggers that don’t want to make money online through Blogging.  In other words I can trap the other 76% bloggers as my potential audience, coool.

Average Annual Revenue is more than $6,000

The average annual blogger revenue is more than $6,000. However, this is skewed by the top 1% of bloggers who earn $200k+. Among active bloggers that we surveyed, the average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower – $22,000.

I’m optimistic, and wish these figures and graphs will grow upward every year.

Enjoy blogging.

Blog Action Day 2008 – Help Eliminate Poverty

Today is Blog Action Day; thousands of bloggers unite to discuss a single issue – poverty. Aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!

If I talk about my country India, one-third of population lives below the poverty line and India is home to one-third of the world’s poor people. Efforts to alleviate poverty are on in fact speed up after government opens the Indian economy to the world in 1991. Economic reform has changes the face of India since then.

Can we make a difference to this situation, yes we can, I take a oath on this auspicious occasion of Blog action day that whatever I will earn through Shanker Bakshi dot com, I will spend at least 10 % of it every month to feed the need of people living in slums and poverty. I’m telling you this not to impress you but just to make a call that we can make these sorts of vows to contribute something towards our society.

Do You Search Twitter ?

No matter for what purpose and how you would like to use it but I believe Twitter Search is a pretty cool interesting tool.

I know it’s a great idea to have something through which we can see exactly whats the whole world is taking about a particular search term. It helps you find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline? There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to twitter every second.

Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service.

For example if I am very keen to know what users are talking about “Halloween” right now then simply I will type the term Halloween and twitter search with come up with the latest tweets about Halloween, Cool.

Death of Web 2.0 – Party is Over

If we have to believe on guys at 1938 Media then web 2.0 has been over. It was on TechCrunch, Om Malik at GigaOm is determined that Silicon Valley is going to weather the global economic storm without being impacted.

Many blogger think that the present financial crises will swallow Web 2.0, is that true guys? Nah, I don’t believe this that web 2.0 is dead. The party is still not over yet. There are so many good things coming our ways. Web 2.0 will endure everything.

Here I’m giving you a little exercise, cast your vote as – Is this the end of Web 2.0. I would like from those who answer in “NO” to explain why they think that it’s still not over yet.

Image courtesy TechCrunch.

Google May Penalize Websites With Shorter Period Domain

One of the important criteria on which Google Ranks websites is Domain Age.  That mean if a website has a shorten expiration period then Google may treat it as a site created for spamming purpose. The reason for this is that many spam sites are often registered for short periods of time.

Domain registration for two years or five year is a good idea. That’s why many Hosting and domain registration sites come up with some really great offers for registration of longer duration. You can make upfront payments to book your domain for several years. The other advantage is that you can save few bucks while booking a domain for a longer period.

Johns Wu – The Man Who Sell His Blog For US $15 Million

Johns Wu, a 22 year old guy from San Marino, CA is really a fortunate guy, manage to sell his two year old WordPress powered blog Bankaholic to a financial info site BankRate for huge US$ 15 Million.

BankRate will pay $12.4 million up front, with another $2.5 million possible earn out over the next 12 months. Bankaholic’s sole employee John Wu will assist in the transition and remain for an unspecified period of time.

Congratulation Johns for milking out million. Here is the Press release note from BankRate confirming the acquisition.

Bankaholic has an Alexa ranking of 41,904, Google Trend shows approx 8000 unique visitor to blog daily, Bankaholic main source of revenue Sources are AdSense, BankRate Partner Program main source of traffic is Organic Search, and it is manage by only one person, yes The Great John Wu.

New WordPress 2.7 Will Have Automated WP Upgrade Feature

Enough of fighting with WordPress Upgrades every other month. Our new WordPress 2.7 will have this new feature which will allow us to upgrade every WordPress upgrade afterwards automatically within our admin panel.

What is New “Crazyhorse” WordPress Administration Panel?

According to The Blog Herald:

The new “crazyhorse” WordPress Administration Panels interface, a new Write Post Panel that allows dragging and dropping of meta boxes so you can rearrange your writing surface, the ability to hide columns on the content index pages, inline editing of posts and Pages on the new content index pages, comments XMLRPC API, sticky posts, automatic WordPress Plugin installation and integrated Plugin browser, HTTP Only auth cookies, and much more. The MOST exciting features are the ability to automatically upgrade WordPress and the total revamping of the Comments Panel to include replying to comments, keyboard shortcuts (hot keys) for managing comments, and threaded comments to help you keep track of the conversation.

Other Features of WordPress 2.7

Ryan Boren unveiled in his latest some new cool features of WordPress 2.7

• New admin UI based on the crazyhorse experimental UI branch with new menus and navigation
• New edit post page that allows dragging and dropping of Meta boxes. Boxes can be expanded and collapsed as before and now also completely hidden.
• Ability to hide columns on the content index pages
• Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages
• Comments XMLRPC API (Who wants comment moderation on the iPhone? Me.)
• Reply to comments from the admin
• Keyboard hot keys for managing comments
• Threaded Comments and new wp_list_comments() API
• Sticky Posts
• Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser
• HTTPOnly auth cookies
• New HTTP request API
• A new SSH2 filesystem abstraction for updates and installs over sftp

Can you switch over to WordPress 2.7 bypassing previous upgrade WordPress 2.6.2?

Many of us not taking WordPress Upgrade 2.6.2 seriously and waiting to switch over directly to WordPress 2.7, but it is advisable to upgrade to 2.6.2 before heading over to new version as the security flaw this update repairs applies to all PHP applications, not just WordPress, and specifically targets those with open registration, which includes multiple blogger blogs and registration for comments. All are seriously recommended to download WordPress 2.6.2 and upgrade immediately.

So as I always say just wait for the whole new WordPress Blogging Experience.

Going Thru Dry Eye Syndrome

My daily eight hour job requires hard work on computer; back home six hours blogging also call for a fight with my newly purchased HP Presario laptop, the result was expected and pretty obvious, I’m going through “dry eye syndrome” ,

itching, burning, and irritation of the eyes, sometimes called “dry eye syndrome,” is one of the most common problems treated by eye care professionals. I advise all my blogger friends out there, please take care as too much stress on eye and working long hour on computer is harmful for eyes. It is essential to have regular breaks so that your eyes can have a rest.

Hope it will be all right soon.

How Much Crazy You Are About Your Blog Design?

Your favorite MMO blog John Chow dot Com has gone thru a complete blog design makeover last week. Shoemoney already did that a couple of month back. Worth mentioning here kid Carl Ocab stated in his recent post that bloggers in their early stages worry about their design too much. They spend countless hours working around their theme,… they lose time or if not, lose energy to create a good post. Problogger Darren Rowse warns; blog design is important at creating a first impression but when you find yourself tweaking it, reworking it, planning your next one more than actually writing content for your blog you might be in trouble.

I agree with his statement, yes blogger do concern too much about their blog design rather then concentrating on writing good articles. Well I guess everyone has to go through this stage of blogging, I remember initial blogging days when I used to change my blog theme every month.

It will be interesting to note what your take on the following:

I’m planning to re-design this blog in next one month or so, initially I consider buying a premium theme and going through a complete conversion but now I feel I will do the redesigning by myself and only will make few necessary changes in blog header design and placing some extra widgets. My blog friend Nadeesha promises me that he will help me out doing this.

Buddy Sayed Balkhis helping you pimp your blog design, provided if you sign up to his feeds and lucky enough to be chosen by him for blog re-design services.

Well if you think blog design or theme plays an important part then I would like you to analyze following

Popular Blogs with Premium Blog Designs

[1] John Chow dot Com

[2] Shoemoney

[3] Zac Johnson

[4] Yaro Starak

[5] Problogger

Popular Blogs with very simple blog Designs/Layouts

[1] TechCrunch

[2] Dosh Dosh

[3] Seth Godin

[4] Copy Blogger

[5] Chris Brogan

Stand out of the crowd

I do consider your Blog design means a lot, if your blog looks exactly like other hundreds and thousands blogs in the blogsphere then definitely it will be easy for you to create a distinguish identity. But if you wish to do so you can opt to buy and install a premium blog theme on your blog. Here is where you can find one:

You can grab a unique blog theme as low as US $ 79.

Here is the code – Go and grab it.

Comment below how much you are concerned about your blog design/Theme/Layout.

I am expecting some interesting answers.

Don’t Care What Other People Are Saying About You

Don’t care what other people are saying about you. The moment you start listening to the critics, is the moment you start to fail.

This was the statement made by Mr. Loren Feldman in recent Izea Fest held at Orlando. Loren runs a video blog 1938media.com where he plays with his puppets for creating news. In his words – “We are satirists. We also do parodies. We are controversial sometimes. We seem to be pretty popular.

Now this statement has so much in it, I strongly believe that criticism always hit very hard to one’s self confidences. There are chances that it may strike you so hard you find yourself completely wrecked down from inside. The beauty is this statement has been made by a person who is in business of pulling legs and cracking gags on others.

Anyway, how you take criticism, well there is one very established axiom that you must keep some true critics with you who will help you to point out your mistakes and craft you to perform better. If you ask me – I don’t believe this. Simply because I think you should believe in yourself, in fact you never need any body to tell you about your mistakes, I suppose you always know that which are the things you are doing wrong and which one are right. What say?

You try and listen to your critics, you mould yourself as they says, you find yourself a totally different person, you work hard to mould some of your basic characteristic, you continue listening to them and changing yourself accordingly and then one fine day you find it difficult to live with this fake replica of yours.

I remember when king khan was struggling to make his mark in Bollywood, in his initially movies he kind of stutter while delivering dialogue. People raise questions on his ability to deliver dialogue; I guess he never care about these criticisms about his stuttering dialects because if he really did then his career as a Bollywood actor would have been over. He still dialect his dialogue the same ways and see the same bunch of critics love the way he speaks now. His stuttering dialogue delivery has become his signature.

While surfing this morning I come across to this very interesting post, a blogger request her readers to make comments on a post simply because she wants to prove that she has many readers who read her blog and appreciate her literary genius. But why she was doing that; because one of her friend challenge – if her blog really has any reader. Unfortunately only few comments were made which mean she failed to prove her position before her “critic” friend. This was the last post on her blog until today; I guess she give up blogging. Congratulation to that “Destructive Minds”.

Just listen to your own voice; you are the best judge of your acts. You know your abilities. You are the BOSS.

5 Sites and Services Which Distracts Me from Blogging

YouTube

This is biggest time sucker. When ever I visit YouTube for some referral videos for my topic, it always traps me with some really interesting hundreds and thousands of videos available on the site. It’s all starts with playing related videos on the subjects then some more related videos and there you are, lost and drown in the deep pool of videos. I don’t know about you but in my case it always distracts me from my purpose of visiting it.

AIMs like Yahoo, G-Talk MSN

I forget where I read that, but it was very interesting to see, somebody was claiming that its difficult to write a productive great post if your IM chat appellate is ON and some of your best buddies are online. I believe he is right in stating that. One always finds it difficult to write a good post while chatting with friends.

Orkut

I don’t see Orkut as a great help in promoting my blog. I rather find it a time killing exercise which produces nothing in return for my blog. I love to be there though being a social animal.

MySpace

It’s been ages since I was there. I don’t find anything there for me or for any other blogger to promote a blog with MySpace. Initially I dig out some possibilities for promotion of SBDC through it but I find it’s not a very effective tool.

Twitter

I put the twitter bird at the last place; no doubt it sucks my blogging time and energy but also helps me find some visitors to my site. So it’s works both ways. On the first hand a really cool tool to get some readers to my blog and on the other hand distracts from conductive blogging.

Image courtsy Yewenyi

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