32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking by Scott Hanselman
Scott Hanselman is a blogger's blogger. If you are not reading his blog, you should take a look because it's one of the best technical blogs out there. And now he's done a brain dump of what it takes to great a great blog.
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Blog Interesting - 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking
He's not claiming that he's got the magic keys to the kingdom on blogging - just that there are ways that he sees that blogs normally suck.
I'm looking at my blog over the past number of years and realizing that I've broken at least 30 of the 32 that he's talked about - in fact this post is probably breaking a couple of the tenants that he's posting.
For any of the rest of this post to make sense - you should go Scott's post. :)
I originally was going to to go point by point and make comments on each of the 32 items but I realized that Scott already said his points well enough. Instead, I'm going to group his items into two major categories and comment on them that way.
Category 1: Know why you are blogging and blog to accomplish your goals. This is a huge deal and encompasses number's 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 21, 22, 24, 30, 31 and 32 of Scott's 32 ways.
The advice is that you should know and blog for your audience. There are a number of ways to get to know your audience. The type of content you put up will determine who you draw in. But that's not enough, you need to watch your statistics and leverage analytical packages to tune your blog to the people that are actually watching your blog.
If you want a technical audience, you should not blog about your kids, dog, fish and so on. Keep the blog on point. Funny enough, this is one that Scott breaks quite often. My quick answer for my need to publish private bits of my life is to have a second blog that's just for my friends and family and authenticated to be so. Politics - absolutely stay clear of this one. This is like actors - I've been a long time fan of the acting ability of a given actor (notice that I'm not naming one so that I'm not betraying political motivations) and then they are in some politically motivated film and start splashing all over the media on an activist bent and it turns me off of that actor for quite a while... Though I'm very politically motivated in my private life - I keep all of that on my personal blog as well because politics and business don't mix all that well.
Category 2: Make your blog easy to access, read and interact with. This encompasses #s 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30.
If people can't find your blog, content on your blog or read your blog - your content will be lost. Here I need a lot of help. I'm actually working on a dasBlog theme of my own that will hopefully help here. The ones that come out of the box are not bad, but I'm looking for something that's a step above. I got a lot of legs out of a fun joke with Chris Bernard during our tour that he has a much prettier, easier to read blog but I had more information. The reality is that is that his information deep and rich as well as well formatted. It's just focused on a slightly different group of people than mine is as he writes for designers/architects and I write for architects/developers. I'm, hopefully, going to get some help from him putting together my new theme. I'm planning on incorporating the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license in the theme so it's on everything. A large part of the theme is deciding what's above the fold. I have a minor in Communications and we spent a lot of time in print layout. What's above the fold verses what's below the fold is very important. Does your logo take up the entire screen at 1024? Do you have nav links to important things at the top on the right or left hand nav? Do you require people to scroll to find your contact information? Part of this is dependent on the purpose of the blog but you can help make a statement about what your purpose is by what's above the fold.
I do have comments on, but the two of you don't post many comments... :) This is one that I'm just not sure how to push. I just don't have that many comments on my blog. That could be a lack of traffic or it could be that I'm not controversial enough to warrant comments.
Use a consistent set of rules to get to your blog, don't move you blog, cross post or otherwise muddy the waters. I've broken all of these rules and will probably mess up again and again in this arena.
One of the interesting bits that Scott talks about is the idea that we shouldn't just subscribe to a given category. I agree with that completely but I think that the categories are broken fundamentally broken. I'd much rather have a everything except type of categorization. For example, I have to subscribe to the entire feed to get everything but I'd really like to eliminate politics and personal from the technical feeds that I read. There's not a good way to do that right now with the current categorization systems. One of these days - in my spare time - I'll work on this.
Category Scott didn't mention it...
Scott talked about allowing others to use your content with correct attribution but he didn't talk about linking to others. When you have a great conversation or see something on a blog or otherwise get an idea from another blogger - you should make sure that you share the blog love with them and link to them in the post. For example, John Mullinax is good at this as he attributes people that he discussed an idea with in email even like in his post on Build to last is dead, speed rules, competency in current. Resistance is futile.
Put your blog on your business card - if that's appropriate. It's a great way for contacts to find more about you and keep an open dialog going.
Don't feel like everything that you post has to be curing cancer or something brilliant. If it's interesting to you, post it. It will be interesting to others - maybe not everyone in the world but it will be interesting to someone. This also means that you will have a personal audience. You and the next blogger down the street will have very different patterns and post that I post on my site may or may not be interesting to you. You need to create your own personal brand and make it your voice that you're putting out there. I talk to a lot of potential bloggers (some inside Microsoft even) and they keep talking about the idea that they don't have anything interesting to say so there's no reason for them to blog. BULL! I'm interested in what they have to say so they will have at least an audience of one. :)
Keep blogging!
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Saturday, June 16, 2007 5:24:44 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00) 
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