Running a blog is easy. I’d love to come up with 10 rules for running a blog, but I couldn’t think of 10 really important ones. The ones I’m going to list are the bare minimum though.
1. If you have a blog, you need to post occasionally. If you’re not going to post something at least once a month or so, then it confuses people. Is this blog alive or dead? There are some good posts here, but the last one is 4 months ago. Should I subscribe? Is the author going to say anything else this year? Also, watch out if you find yourself doing a post like this: “Wow, I haven’t posted here in 6 months. I’ve been so busy doing [whatever]. But I promise I’m going to start posting more often.” If you have two or more of those in a year, and not much else, it might be time to give it up.
2. Ensure your blog has a link to its RSS feed. Most people not going to bookmark your blog and check to see if you wrote anything every day. They’re going to look for that RSS link and add it to their feed reader. The link should ideally be near the top of the page. Don’t make your readers hunt for it. They want to find it and click it because they like you!
3. Somewhere, say who you are and how people can reach you. At the very least who you are. You’d be surprised at how many blogs don’t actually say who the author is. If you want to blog anonymously, I guess that’s your choice, but don’t be wind up being nameless just because you didn’t think to put your name there.
4. Make it easy to find older posts on your blog. Minimally a list of archives. Ideally also a search box. I’ve seen the occasional blog where the last half dozen posts are there, and there’s no way to get at anything else. Again, if you’re doing that for a reason, fine, but don’t do it out of carelessness.
5. Last, but most importantly, for the love of God, enable your comments. In fact points 1-4 are really just fluff so I can rant about this one. 😉 There is nothing worse than reading all the way through a blog post, and either agreeing with it completely, or violently disagreeing with it, or just really feeling like you have something to add to it, and forming up a reply as you are reading it, and then getting to the end of it and finding that there is no way to comment. It’s infuriating. Whether you mean it or not, it also comes across as arrogant. It says, “I have something important to say, and you should read it. But I don’t give a poop what you have to say about it. Your voice doesn’t matter. Only mine does.” It also says you don’t get the web. Get a radio show or a newspaper or magazine column. But if you can’t handle feedback, you shouldn’t be blogging. Sure, there’s spam, but there’s plenty of software to combat that. Sure there are trolls and a-holes, and oh my God, there are people who might actually DISAGREE with you!!! The horror. There’s also comment moderation. Even so, in the 7 years I’ve had this blog, I think I’ve only censored 2-3 comments (other than obvious spam). I’ve had plenty of people calling me all kinds of names and being all troll-like and some really pissed me off. But hey, that’s life. There are real people out there. Some are jerks. Some are insane. As Stacey says, “suck it up, princess.” And please, really, really, really, really consider NOT making your users register to comment. I almost never do, unless it’s a close friend. And then I curse them under my breath. I’m talking about the ones where you have to make a user name and password and get a confirmation email and click on the link, blah blah blah. Your blog is not a social network. I have enough passwords to remember without needing to remember one more just so I can make a comment on your blog. Sure, this cuts down on the amount of random, “Thanks for the post” type comments or “You spelled TEH wrong” stuff. But if someone is all riled up to troll you, they’re going to make the effort. It’s your call, but know that you’ll be pissing off many of your readers. Some people don’t even like comment moderation. I do the one-time moderation thing – I’ll moderate your first comment. After that, your info is in the system and any other comments go through immediately. I think it’s a decent compromise.
All of the above is supported with any popular blogging software right out of the box. If you’re rolling your own blog software, you really should support the above or it just looks kind of lame.
Don’t forget “Make sure yahoo isn’t screwing with your RSS feed and switching it with a spam feed” 😉
Then again, maybe you are a pharmacy…
That isn’t happening again, is it??? I don’t see it this time. I hope you are joking.
Haha no, still works fine. Just teasin’!
6. (Additionally to point 5) Provide a way to subscribe to the comment thread! Yep that goes for you too Mr. Bit-101! 😉 It’s bothersome to go back to a blog every day to see if somebody replied to your comment, and I won’t bother much about checking. There are decent WP plugins that provide email notifications of somebody else commented.
7. Don’t use the word F*ck or similar swearing in every one of your blog posts because you think it makes you look cool or hip! Instead it makes you look cheap and dumb. There are a couple of these that I stopped reading because of this reason.
6. OK, you can now subscribe to the comments of a particular post. I don’t consider it vital, but nice for sure.
7. This blog is mostly PG rated. I’m not offended by profanity, but I agree that you look a lot more respectable if you can get your point across without it. I guess it works for some people, but not for me.
PS: re. 7 … no, not your blog! I meant some other blogs.
Oh and one more …
8. Don’t use Captcha Challenges that are impossible to read! This goes not only for blogs but for any other site (Good Example: Stack Overflow!!) If it takes a person 5 minutes or more to enter a correct captcha code you clearly don’t care about your commenters!
BTW I hope flashandmath.com will enable comments some day.
Well Keith, I have something serious to say about your point #1 and it is that most of the people I know who have encouraged to start writing and keep a “blog” they became “frustrated slaves” of it. Why? well, I think that the main reason is because of whatever they write, they expect a lot of feedback from readers, they want to increase their webrank, they want to be visited more and more… which is for me a bit SAD! because of it creates a certain dependence that affects their style of living and emotional discipline. How many people nowadays just gave up of it? and this is not as simple of saying “I give up” and that’s all… nah! there is a huge frustration behind when nobody read your blog, especially when you have spent a lot on it.
I have to confess something… One day, at the end of September 2008 I was in Flash On The Beach (Brighton) in one of the theatres (The Dome) and, there was a crazy speaker who start his session with a picture of a house saying “I run out of money and suddenly people start buying my book Foundation Actionscript 3… things move, Thank you very much for buying, here is my house”… of course you know who I am talking about LOL!! the thing is that after that session I just realized that I have tons of experiments, code and things that I have done during the last years in my hard disc totally wasted (in vane) and then the following year I bought a domain and published most of the things I do. Everything began after that session. My website was intended to be more for the latin community but at the end all the feedback I got was more from English speakers.
I am not definitely a slave of it, I don’t care about how often it is visited… I just published my things there for whoever wants to get them. I think that this is a good approach.
Cheers!!!
Well, to get visitors, and repeat visitors, you need a few things.
1. Useful or interesting content.
2. Consistent useful or interesting content.
3. Make it easy to spread the word. Hence the tweet and digg buttons on each post.
4. Points 1-5 above. Make it easy on people and don’t piss them off.
Oh, and thanks for mentioning that session. I’m glad it inspired you to put your work out there!
No, this is me who has to say thank you!! If it wasn’t because of that session I probably would have all my experiments still in my hard drive doing nothing, wasted. Thanks! It really worth publishing the things we do, there is always someone looking for it, it is interesting nowadays the amount of people re-using the things I have done (I receive frequently some crazy questions), at least all this wasn’t in vane. It just takes ages to keep everyone happy, we need to be careful with this, I wouldn’t like to become a slave of my website. Anyway, one more time thanks! and thanks for the tips. cheers!
“Time for the top 5. Why only 5? Cause the man wants to deprive me of 10. ” – Nat X
As for #1 I generally agree but for tech blogs I’d be less strict. I know what it’s like, you might be absorbed by a project for a few months and have no time to post.
Personally I have a few of those blogs in my reader and I don’t mind, if the occasional post is really interesting then. jpauclair comes to mind and others.
Quality matters more than quantity.