Ironically enough you violated #10 w/ this post ;-). That being said, you rarely metablog so I’ll let it slide this time. I’ve personally learned a lot of these the hard way, and more often than not it was because I saw something on another blog that annoyed me, only to realize I was guilty of the exact same behavior on my site.
I remember taking the default calendar off my blog thinking:
“Well, it would be helpful if someone missed a week of posts and wanted to quickly navigate back to them, but, that’s not going to happen often enough for me to leave this otherwise useless component on the page.”
Then I got to the arbitrary images part; I was fairly certain I only included vaguely witty images, but there was a small fraction of me that thought the image of Sherlock Holmes was pointless. Upon further inspection, I’m pleased to say that Sherlock can stay.
Actually, now that I look at everything for a third time, it seems that I don’t break any of the “Atwood Guidelines of Taste”. My 4 readers had better appreciate it!
Great list! For the most part, I agree about allowing comments, but some blogs serve different purposes than others.
Many blogs, such as Daring Fireball, are a one-way microphone for opinions. DF reveals Gruber’s perspective on things… and people still come. His is an “answer” blog.
Others, like my own blog, are meant to be “question” blogs - we seek input and throw out ideas to be torn apart like meat to rabid dogs. Here, comments are key.
Like you I started early, mostly with just regular websites.
There’s so many little details to remember, but I have discovered the value of blogs however. They are much simpler to operate than traditional websites.
I’ve also discovered the value of askimet too! lol
What you say is right, but this things come bundled with wordpress.com official hosting. They offer two-column layout and 1/3rd of the page is left blank.
People think that the page is looking vacant and tries to stuff it by using widgets. I did the something when I took WordPress.cOm as the only solution to quickly cook some tutorials and my thoughts. I write about stuff that I found it hard to learn.
I have now moved to a shared hosting provider and will soon learn how to customize wordpress as per my need.
This is a world of free thoughts and it is still hard to present it for free 
I know I’m reading this about 4 years after you wrote it, but just wanted to say I love the article!
I am making some of the mistakes (oops) and then I am apparently doing a few things right.
Thank you for sharing this…do you have any updates?
I’m an infant blogger and hungry for knowledge!
Karen
http://www.ablogtoremember.com/?p=329