I thought my blog was just kind of un-hip (my blogroll is so short!), but it turns out that it’s actually just un-cliched! Thanks, Jeff!
This list presumes all blogs have some common purposes, which I believe is a false presumption. For example, some blogs are intended to be diary-like archives primarily for the author’s small circle of interested people, and gawkers do so at their own peril. And some blogs are extremely nichey (is that a word?), and strictly for news/analysis about a very specific topic, at topic about which news occurs at only very irregular intervals in time.
One of my blogs had a calendar. It was part of a default style. It was a handy way to get a link to a single entry. There must be another way to do this, because i didn’t notice that it’s gone.
I might get inspired to write a blog entry that breaks all of these rules. Should be fun. I could start by talking about how my computer has been down for the past week, then apologizing for not producing new entries anyway. It could have a custom calendar showing the dates and times when it went down, and how it came back up. I’d piss and moan about how much work it was getting it going, and how some stupid thing brought it down again just before i was going to start my backups. Maybe an image of my car, half dismantled could go in the middle. I could disable my “about me” link, and while at it, shut down my RSS feed, disable comments. I don’t currently carry ads. Maybe i could make up some fake ads - you know, like Saturday Night Live. “Super Colon Blow cereal”, or something. A bullet list pointing out a dozen blogs that haven’t had content for at least a month… it would take some research.
OK, so i’ve given away the plot. Maybe i won’t.
Do you ever get tired of reading so many comments? Okay, so maybe I’m just jealous. ;o)
This is an insightful list, and you provide us with good reasoning and advice; even tough I don’t agree with all topics - for example, I think tag clouds are really useful and interesting as a means to provide a quick glimpse of what a blog is about, and I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with writing a dear diary-like if that’s what you’re going for. Consistency is the key to success, IMO.
I commend you on writing a great article, but I pity the users who will blindly follow every single advice. (what was bullet #3 about, anyway?)
There’s a third way to improve readability that you should have mentioned: limit column width.
I recently redid my blog layout to be fixed-width.
Article/text-based sites are simply hard to read (and look crappy) in high resolutions. Plus, with the ubiquitous acceptance of widescreen displays, the number of users who may be reading your site in a disproportionately wide resolution is ever-increasing.
http://zinknation.net/Zinknation+Redone++No+Longer+A+Liquid+Layout.aspx
Great list. I’m sure I’m guilty of a few!
Guilty on lots of these - you’ve seriously made me re-think calendars and Blogrolls. But blogging about blogs - mea culpa but I try to do it with home made comix does that exempt me?
PS that unecessary photo looks to me like the entrance to the Gents public toilets at the corner of Aldwych and The Strand in Central London - are they taking the piss?
ORANGE!
Anybody already point out that Jeff is breaking #10 with this post?
Very good points, Jeff! I really like your posts about blog and site optimization!
Great post, keep up the good work. Think I learn or read something new every week on your blog. Glad to see you learned something since the #000001 #000002 entries… 
Still can’t find a rss reader I like, so you site is still viewed the old way. 
/happy reader since 2005
Re. #8 and the rest - don’t forget there are people who blog as an outlet, or just so their friends can keep in touch. They’re not trying to get famous, “find an audience”, or get anything else out of a blog.
Blogging isn’t a religion.
My personal Pet Peeve, though? Right-click blocking scripts, with messages like “OMG teh kontentz be © me! Donut steelz!” - they both keep me from doing useful things like open links in a new window/tab, and Idon’t stop me saving your precious images/i. Stop it, people. Just stop.
Calendar widgets are ok if you post only occasionally and have no tags. Otherwise, I agree, they are a waste of space.
For #8: This ain’t your diary. I’d change this to Pick a subject and Stick to it. Online diaries are fine, just don’t advertise as a technical guru, and post your personal stuff. Take The Fat Cyclist. Pretty straightforward blog about a guy losing weight to do cycling. It was pretty popular. There was also a blog about lists; it was funny and that’s all it contained.
All of those are minor compared to
(1) Posts that are undated. Strangely enough it seems to be the MSM that do this the most. Whole classes of posts are just worthless without the date.
(2) (Related to (1)): useless cutesy differential dates on comments like “3 days later”. The reason nobody was doing this years ago is NOT because the Rails helper didn’t exist yet.
I find rather…amusing… the way people likes to point the “mistakes” of the author of this post. One of the most recurring ones ive seen is the “you say metabloging is boring yet you do it WITH THIS POST” well yeah, hes metabloging right now cause it IS the reason of the post.
What i “think” he may refer to is to metablog as an “habit”. i agree with the top (n) lists, it indeed is a good tool to direct people’s attention to something BUT it also “prevents” them of reading what is NOT in that list. tag clouds are annoying unless they are well designed, which regretably doesnt happen very often.
Calendars… yeah… i like better a search function and an Archive.
About the random, arbitrary images… yeah, they are a burden, because they often distract people from the original content thinking “hmm,… what could be the relation of this image?” then they are more interested in the thinking of the relation than on the original purpose of the post. and well, after all, how long would it take you to find a proper image to post?.
I dont quite agree with the Diary cliche. indeed, some people may not like it, but some people may do. dont remove it or encourage it. just set it as an additional feature among your contents.
"World Conquering 101"
“why cars collide?”
“my Diary”
“subatomic particles FAQ”
etc.
im tired. ill stop writing now.
im fully aware of the ortographical and gramatical mistakes. i DONT speak english and dont feel like IMPROVING right now.
“I can’t think of a single time I have ever found the blog calendar widget helpful.”
I don’t have one in my public blog, but in my Confluence newsblog on our internal wiki, I have one (well, everyone does), and it’s essential for my bosses to find the status report for such-and-such a day.
It’s doubly useful because I’m the manager, so my daily status update contains our velocity, code coverage metrics, and a recording of our daily stand-up meeting.
But no, I don’t have one in my regular blog.
Regarding anonymity, I have one friend who blogs under his real name who has become unemployable in his field due to his rather strong opinions on politics and use of hyperbole to express them. Another frined ended up getting death threats for something he posted on his blog. Not the Bevis Butthead grade threats via comments, either. He was actually contacted by the FBI about specific, credible threats that had been made regarding his life. I’ll stick with semi-obscurity, thanks…
I’m curious: what about tag clouds that are implemented as more of a weighted list? There are still varying sizes for the more popular tags, but they’re all in a list form.
I think your list, particularly points 8 and 11, is targeted at a particular subset of the blogging community. Specifically the rather vocal “I feel my opinions are important and should be listened to but nobody’s paying me” subset.
There are other types of blogs out there though…
For example there is the private blog used to communicate with friends and family who may or may not be geographically isolated from you. For these people the blog IS their diary, so point 8 is moot.
And then there’s the journalist-blogger who’s job is to report on what happened TODAY, and to them point 11 is rather moot.
But otherwise a good list, even if the post does violate half of its own rules (particularly numbers 10 12)
apparently my trackback didn’t work, so here’s my post about this post…
http://nstryker.com/blog/2007/08/20/stereotypical