Everybody lies

As promised earlier, here is the update on what I added to my sidebar instead of the Blogrush widget. It is a WordPress plugin by Sarah from StuffbySarah.net. Officially it’s called “What others are saying” and what it does is showing a list with links to the 5 latest posts by people from your personal blogroll. (I renamed it “Others say”, because that was short enough to fit in my sidebar.)

I know that this is not exactly the same thing that Blogrush did, because this obviously doesn’t bring in any traffic to my own page (not that BR ever did, either). It just gives visitors a chance to discover other blogs I like, plus it gives out some link-love to people whose writing I enjoy. Win-win as far as I am concerned, because offering my readers a chance to find interesting new sites was the main reason I installed BR in the first place.

Another thing I like about this plugin is, that I have total control over which websites it shows in this list. Well, since I have added more than 5 blogs to it and it shows only the latest 5 headlines, I guess the ultimate decision about who is shown depends on who updates most often. But at least I won’t have any spammers in this list, and no make-money-online blogs or any other crap I can’t really control.

When I have more time I will fiddle around a bit with the formatting to make it stand out a bit more, but for now this will have to do as I am just getting ready for the drive back to Leipzig.

Let me know what you think about this plugin, if you would ever click on such a list - and I wouldn’t mind if anybody could think of a better name for it (preferable not more than 3 words long).

One less item to clutter up my sidebar. As I said in this post I wanted to give Blogrush a chance, before I condemn it as useless clutter.

Now I have had it for about 2 weeks and not only have I seen zero effect on my traffic. I also noticed more or less every time I visited my own site, that the widget was showing links to sites that have absolutely nothing to do with my own topics, and even some to sites I expressly blocked (making money blogs and such stuff). That’s more than just useless, that’s totally annoying. Especially since finding interesting new links for myself was one of the main reasons I installed it in the first place.

According to their blog Blogrush will be launching some major changes to their service within next week. Well, it would be a nice start, if I was able to use my dashboard and access my stats. So maybe I should give them some more time to get their shit together before I toss it.

But, to be honest, I just don’t care anymore. Maybe I’ll try it again some time, but right now I don’t have much time for blogging and monitoring this thing to see if it behaves as it is supposed to is just not on.

Besides, I have found another way to showcase some interesting links to other people’s posts in my sidebar. I’ll give that a try on the weekend and write more about it once I get it to work.

It seems I have just been going back on my own advice in the last post regarding uncluttered sidebars. After long deliberation and some initial misgivings I have finally signed up and added a Blogrush widget to my own sidebar (you have to scroll down a bit to see it).

When I started seeing those widgets appear, and read the initial reports about the abysmally low click-through rates from some of the professional bloggers (god, that phrase still makes me giggle every time), I took quite a dim view to it. Actually I already had a quite cynic post drafted that made fun of the whole concept.

So, what made me change my mind? Well, firstly, it seems wrong to make fun of a product I haven’t even tested (yeah, I know, normally that wouldn’t stop me). And, secondly, I am just a bit curious to see if maybe it does actually work better than I thought. Contrary to common belief I have no problem with admitting to be wrong from time to time.

The thing that I still find curious about it is that you have a 10-tier referral system watch the video on their homepage to find out the details), which basically allows you to “earn” more impressions through the traffic their blogs get. Somehow that has a definite pyramid scheme sound to my ears. As I said before, I am by no means a mathematician, so I might be totally wrong about it, but somehow it seems to me the numbers they promise you can’t really add up…

I have seen that many of you guys already had the widget for a while. Have any of you noticed a marked increase in visitor numbers through it?

Thanks to my recently renewed blog-reading addiction I have spent several hours each day surfing the net and hopping from blog to blog. And I have begun to notice some things that tend to annoy me each time I encounter them. Some of them are bad enough to make me leave the respective blog for good. Of course I am not telling anybody how to run their blogs. I am not trying to convince anybody to remove these features from their blog or saying they are necessarily all evil and to be avoided like the plague.

All I’m saying is that I noticed these things and didn’t like them. Now, this is of course only the opinion of one person. I might be completely wrong, so feel free to ignore me. Then again, I might have a point in some cases and if you are wondering why not more people read your blog, these things might have something to do with it, because maybe they annoy not only me. Who knows? I’m just sayin’ …

So, here is my Top 13 of the most annoying things I’ve found in blogs recently:

1. PayPerPost (no link this time, they’re not worth it)

I mentioned that one already in my last TT, so I won’t re-hash my problems with it again in detail. My opinion in short: It sucks. Big time.

2. CAPTCHA boxes to verify your comments

This is wide-spread among Blogger blogs, but I know of some others who use it as well. I know comment spam is a nuisance and this might work well to keep the spammers out. Unfortunately it annoys the hell out of your human commenters. Why?

Because a) Especially in Blogger I usually need at least 2 tries to get this thing to accept my comment. I don’t know why that is, maybe I have poor eye-sight and type in the wrong code, or maybe it just doesn’t like me. I don’t care. It just annoys me.

b) This is in regards to other sites where the CAPTCHA code hast to be entered on a separate page after sending off the comment. Usually I leave a site after I have commented (the ones I read regularly, that is, because there I usually comment on the latest post and there is no reason to stay there after sending off my comment) - I can’t say how many times I had already left the site before this CAPTCHA crap popped open, so I ended up having to re-type and re-send my comment. Annoying.

There are better ways to combat comment spam. Get yourself a WordPress blog and activate the Akismet plugin and all that dancing around is not necessary anymore (I just saw on Lorelle’s blog that Akismet is available for many other platforms as well.). And I’m sure, there are also ways with Blogger blogs and other blogging platforms to avoid this stuff.

3. Websites with 2 or even 3 sidebars

I understand that some people want to cram as much information as possible into their sidebars, and so one often isn’t enough anymore and they end up using two. (Three is just nuts, and not worthy of any comment.) Now I don’t wanna add any more to the eternal debate about 2-column vs. 3-column blog designs. There are actually some designs that look quite good with 3 columns. Also, the annoyance factor mainly depends on what exactly you fill these sidebars with.

You see, the thing is: all the stuff in the sidebars distracts your readers from your main content, especially if it’s loud and colorful. Plus, and that’s the real irony here: often it is neither really interesting in the first place, nor in any way helpful for them to find their way around your page. Which leads me to:

4. Cluttered sidebars in general

Even if you only got one sidebar, it is not really a good idea to clutter it up with all kinds of gadgets and badges and stuff, that is generally of no particular interest for anybody except yourself.

What do I, as an average reader, look for in a sidebar of a blog? Well, there’s the categories, or maybe a tag cloud instead, a link to the archives could be interesting, and a blogroll (hopefully one with not much more than 200 links, see #5). These are the essentials. Everything else are already extras.

Of course I am not saying you should add nothing else to your sidebar (I’m not trying tell you what to goddamn do here in any case) - after all I have a couple other things in mine as well. I’m just saying, don’t overdo it. Does anybody really need to know what the weather is like in your place, or what your avatar looks like (that’s more something for your about-page, I’d say), or in exactly how many communities you are involved, or how many web movements or memes you joined? Or whatever else people clutter up their sidebars with. I think not.

5. Out-of-date Blogrolls and other link lists

We all are interested, when we read a blog regularly, to check out the links in the blog’s link section, or blogroll, or whatever that section is usually called, right? Why is that? Because we think, however wrongly, that this is a list of links the blog owner likes and therefore recommends. And if we like his blog, we might also like the other sites he obviously frequents regularly. Right? Wrong.
Because often, if you click through the whole list on somebody’s blog (yes, sometimes I actually do that), you will find loads of dead links, of blogs that were updated last in 2005, of addresses that don’t even exist anymore and lots of other unpleasant surprises. What that tells me is that the owner of such a list adds links without ever re-checking them to see if they still work. Lazy.
As a blog owner, how do you decide which links to add to this section? Do you just link indiscriminately to every page or blog that once sparked your interest, or whose owner commented on your blog? Or do you really want me to believe that you are keeping up with 200 different blogs? Yeah, right. Get a life.
I actually like checking out other people’s link lists, but it works much better if you keep them simple. And short. And if you want to keep a list of web resources, or any other kind of list that tends to get longer and longer and longer, just put it on an extra page. Don’t clutter up your sidebar with it.

6. No Home-button

This one should, thanks to ready-made and easily available, templates not be a very widspread problem anymore. But funnily, lots of Blogspot blogs still have it.
How often is it that you find a blog through a link on another page that points to an archive page? There you are then, reading that post, finding it interesting and wanting to check out the rest of the blog. Now, even if there is no extra button or link, in most websites a click on the blog title or on the header graphic will easily transport you back to the homepage.
But what if that doesn’t work? (As it doesn’t in many Blogspot blogs, and I’m not all too sure about normal Blogger blogs either.) And if you’re very unlucky, neither is there a link to the main archive page. So you manually delete the archive part of the address from the address line of your browser - in the hopes of getting back to the homepage and be able to navigate around from there. Of course, by that time I often already lost interest in the blog altogether.
Clumsy? Very. Annoying? You bet.

7. Obtrusive Ads

Ok, this is probably one of the most annoying things for me in any website, but especially in blogs. I understand about wanting to monetize your blog (if I think it usually works all too well is a wholly different question). The thing is, if you plaster the whole page with ads, it looks butt ugly. If it’s only the sidebar, I might be able to ignore it. But if there are ads above or even within the posts, or those floating things that open up over the whole page, it just pisses me off. I don’t want to scroll down half a page or have to close an ad-window before I even get to see your content. Also, flashing things or stuff that endlessly moves around make me run for the hills in under 5 seconds.
If you have noisy, flashy ads on your page, you better have killer content I find nowhere else on the web, because otherwise I just won’t bother trying to find my way through all the other crap on your page to try to read it.

8. Huge RSS buttons

This is something I have come across a few times now. Here, for instance, or here. The worst examples I didn’t even bookmark - because I didn’t know I would need them again as a bad example. [Oh, and just because somebody apparently had a problem with my opinion in this point, I'd like to add here that I don't in any way want to criticize the blogs I linked to up there. (One of them I have actually subscribed to quite a while ago.) I just needed examples and these were the first two I stumbled upon while writing this post.]

Yes, I know you want me to subscribe to your RSS feed. Yes, it is very nice of you to make that option easily findable.

But, fuck it, I am not blind. So stop shoving that bloody button in my face. The likeliness of me actually subscribing to your blog does definitely not increase with the size of the stupid button. Concentrate on writing interesting and engaging content for your blog, and I will find a way to subscribe to your feed even if you don’t supply a button at all.

9. Whole rows of social bookmarking icons under each post

And this is one of the less awful examples again! I don’t even know half the services listed here (and please don’t try to explain or recommend them to me - I am not interested).
Two words: traffic whore.
The stuff is bad enough in the sidebar. But some people add literally whole rows of them under each post, ostensibly to make it easier for you, the reader, to digg or stumble or otherwise submit this post to the appropriate social bookmarking site.
Like hell I will. Such stuff looks just desperate.

10. Preview anywhere

Do you know sites where everytime you move your cursor over a link a little window pops up that shows a preview of the target site? Which bloody idiot invented this awful, annoying, stupid crap? Please report to me so I can shoot you.

Not only doesn’t this useless little snapshot picture tell me anything of value about the particular site, it also usually pops up exactly over some text I want to read. And sometimes moving the cursor away isn’t enough to let it vanish again right away. Besides, usually you move the cursor right over the next fucking link.
Did I say PayPerPost was the most annoying thing? I was lying, this shit is right up there with it.

11. Dark Background

Again, this is highly subjective, but I just hate websites with light text on dark backgrounds. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
In my opinion dark background makes the text much harder to read, no matter how good the contrast is. Even with white text on black background I feel my eyes grow tired very quickly. Especially if you, like me, read blogs for hours at a time, it can become quite an annoyance. There is a reason, folks, why black text on white background became the default for every book and paper ever printed - and it’s not just because they were short on black ink, ya know?
Also, I just don’t think it looks nice, but that is just me again…

12. Auto-Play Music

Thank god, it doesn’t seem to be “in” anymore to embed background music on websites, but some poor souls are still left who think it’s funny. On MySpace, of course, it is just the done thing. But that’S just one more reason why MySpace sucks.

It’s all very nice if you want to entertain your readers with your favorite song. Problem is, I don’t usually share your taste in music. Besides, I usually already listen to my own music when I am working on my computer. Also, when I read blogs I have between 10 and 20 different browser tabs open (I open every link in a new tab and finish reading the original site first). So, when suddenly my own music is mixed in with some other song I have to scramble around to find the respective tab, and then hopefully find a button somewhere to turn the song off. If I don’t find one, the site is history anyway, but even if I can turn the music off it still annoys me and I will likely not come back.

13. Dead blogs or ones that are only barely alive

By which I mean, of course, the frequency with which they are updated. It annoys me no end if I stumble upon a blog that has some great posts, but was last updated sometime 2005. Or if a new post gets written every 3 months or so. Or there are 15 posts in one week and then silence for 4 weeks, another 5 posts, then half a year hiatus and so on.

That’s just useless. If you, like me, have the blog just for fun, nobody asks you to post 5 long articles every day. It’s fine if you don’t have much time and post only once or twice a week. But if you do, please try to be halfway consistent. It’s fine with me if I have to check on a blog only once every two weeks to find new posts. But if I have come back twice and there was nothing, you’re off my radar for good.

And if you tried blogging and found out it just wasn’t for you, or you don’t have time for it anymore, or you just don’t have anything to say: for god’s sake, delete your dead blog. It’s not that hard, really.

Another one of my pet peeves are repeated “I don’t know what to write about”-posts. We all have, at one time or another, posted one of them. Mine is not too long ago, actually. And, I guess, once in a while (according to Stephen Fry once in your life!) it is ok. But there are actually blogs out there that seem to consist of not much else than such posts. Little hint: if you can never think of anything to write about, writing may not be the best hobby for you, ya know? ^.^

I just read this at The Blog Herald:

Apparently this guy named Danny Carlton blocks Firefox users from reading his website, because of the AdblockPlus plugin. His reasons for that include:
“Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. ”

LOL

I have seldom heard such crap. I am not not looking at, much less clicking on any ads in blogs anyway as a matter of principle. So, what difference does it make for the blogger if I actually have the ads displayed in my browser or not?
And to block all users of Firefox, even if most of them have never heard of the AdBlock plugin, seems a mite contraproductive to me. But hey, if he can afford the loss of traffic… I’m not complaining, because his site doesn’t look like I’d be interested anyway.
It seems there is a widespread discussion going on about this ad-blocking business. Sounds like a storm in a waterglass to me, but maybe you’d like to read some further articles about it:

Stop stealing my content!
Blocking adverts might cost you money
Are readers obligated to appreciate bloggers?
Ad blocking from a reader’s perspective

Here are some links I stumbled upon during last week’s surfing sessions. Maybe some of them are interesting for you as well.

Wired News: New Genome Map Shows We’re Way More Diverse Than We Thought (ok, that one is probably only interesting for myself)

Mango - learn languages online for free (I didn’t have time to sign up and try it yet, but it sounds like an interesting concept and I will definitely give it a try soon).

Access Flickr! plugin for Firefox - lets you access flickr from countries where it is banned.

Check for broken links with dead-links.com

Browsershots  - test your webdesign in different browsers (I tried it and somehow I never get a shot of all the browsers I requested, but that might only be me…).

Of course, none of them are really new - for all I know everybody else might have been using them for years. I just call them new because they are new to me and I am still not certain most of them have any big value for me personally.

1. RSS feed subscription buttons or links (like the one above my own header picture)

I know they have been around since forever (in terms of the internet probably since 1998 or so), but I never bothered with RSS feeds until just very recently. I always thought, if I like to read a blog I also want to visit it. I like blogs in part because of their design, which also implies that if I hate the design (especially if there are lots of ads) I will likely not come back very often, no matter how good you write. Well, all that is past now, thanks to RSS feeds. Because when I only read the feed I don’t see the blog’s design. I don’t see the ads. I only have to click through if I want to comment, and on many of the new blogs I read nowadays I don’t want to comment.

2. LibraryThing script showcasing random books from blog owners’ collection

This is one little gadget I obviously like, which is why I have it in my own sidebar. I use LibraryThing only to keep track of the last 200 books I have read and liked (although at the moment it also still lists some others of my collection, I will replace them over time), so after a few years it should show only my 200 all-time favorites. I also like to see this widget on other people’s sites, because I am always interested in finding new books to add to my already overwhelming Mount TBR.

3. MyBlogLog pictures of recent readers

This is one of those things I regard as totally useless. The one I show here was taken randomly from another blog, because obviously I don’t have such a thing. This is actually one of the nicer varieties of this widget. There are other, uglier, much bigger versions around. I was just too lazy to look for one right now.

The widget supposedly shows you your recent readers. But of course, it only shows you the ones who have an account at MyBlogLog themselves and have uploaded a picture. The others are either ignored or it shows this black silhouette, whatever.

But what good is that anyway? It’s just one more of those hundreds of social bookmarking sites, where you can join a community. A community doing what exactly, is what I’d like to know? What is it good for? Except cluttering up your sidebar? I just don’t see the appeal.

4. FeedBurner

So, Feedburner burns your feeds. Please don’t ask me, what exactly that means. But apparently it’s the cool thing to do nowadays with your feeds.

The really cool thing is that I can monitor the number of my subscribers (which, for this blog, is surprisingly in the double digits - I still can’t believe it). and, and this is the reason I signed up in the first place, you can offer your feed by email as well, so people who don’t use an RSS reader can read it, too.

Also, you get all kinds of stats, which I have to still play around with a bit to make sense of them. and if you’re proud to have lots of subscribers you can also put nice little thingies like this on your site: - this one is obviously not relating to my site. I will add something like this only if my subscriber count should ever break 100. In other words, probably never. ;o)

5. Google Analytics

I have so much more fun with that than I had with StatCounter. Firstly, because GA has just much more functions and tells you a lot more things about your visitors than the free version of SC does. Secondly, at least for my site, GA shows me more visitors. I don’t know why that is, but I choose to believe the statistics I like more, which is in this case GA’s. There’s even a plugin for WordPress, so that you don’t have to put the code into your template files by hand. I just love WP plugins.

6. StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us, or any other of the gazillion social bookmarking sites out there.

I don’t have an account with any of them, and considering how much time I am wasting with reading blogs already, I am not sure I should sign up at all and risk finding even more good reads. Plus, I am not such a traffic whore that I would spend ages socializing and building a community and doing whatever just to get a few hundred more page impressions. Since I don’t monetize my blog, and I also have an offline life, it just isn’t worth the effort for me.

Besides, I am really not a community type of person. I have enough trouble to keep in touch with my real-life friends, so why should I join dozens of virtual communities? I would neglect them all in a matter of weeks anyway. That said, if I have a little more free time again, I might give StumbleUpon a try sometime. It’s always nice to find potential new favorite blogs.

7. BlogLines and Google Reader

Ever since I discovered RSS feeds I needed a reader as well. These two were the obvious choices to try. In the end I decided on Google Reader, mainly because I liked the interface better and I use Google all the time anyway, so I won’t need to remember yet another login and password.

8. Technorati tags and buttons

I am still not quite certain if I really need this (I mean, let’s be honest, I will never be one of the A-list bloggers, nor do I have the slightest inclination to even try, so why bother with Technorati at all?). I don’t even know yet how to interpret all the data Technorati can give me about my site. (What does this authority figure mean, for instance? Haven’t got a clue, but like to play around with it anyway.)

9. pay per post

Ok, this one is a thing I really really hate with a vengeance. In 95% of the cases reading the sentence “this is a sponsored post” or whatever it usually says, will not only make me disregard everything I read in this particular post, it will also in all probability make me leave this blog and never come back. I understand that many people want to make money with their blogs, and in an attempt to not plaster most of their site over with pesky ads that nobody ever clicks anyway, some people might think this is a good alternative.

Well, good luck, if you think it works for you. I read blogs, especially personal blogs (you know, the ones that are written just for fun and not mainly with profit in mind), because I am interested in the opinions and the outlook on life of the people who write them. If I see a sponsored post (especially if I notice this fact only after I have read to the end of the post) I just feel cheated. That’s not personal content in my eyes, that’s advertisement, pure and simple. If I know that you are paid to endorse a product, how can I trust what you have written? Because I don’t think people would usually write a bad thing about a product they’re reviewing. It’s just crap and one of the sure-fire ways to chase me away forever.

10. Donate to PayPal button

Now I think, this is a hilarious idea. I wonder how often people, even in well-frequented blogs, really use those buttons to donate money to the blog-owner. If you’re interested to try it out yourself, I found a step-by-step instruction here.

11. My still beloved ScribeFire plugin,

Which I use incessantly just like I predicted in this post. This little thing makes posting so much more hassle-free and easy. Aditionally it allows me to save stuff as notes. Those don’t get published to the blog, but are just saved in a list in the browser. I use these notes instead of my bookmarks nowadays to save interesting links, because in a note I can also add a sentence or two about why I found it interesting in the first place, and I can remember on which site I found it, so I can give credit. Often the note is half a blog post already, so later I only have to go back and revise it a little before I can post it. The best plugin I have.

12. The CoComment Firefox plugin

I have found that one just today. Apparently it tracks all the comments you leave on other people’s blog, and the ensuing conversations.

I can’t say yet how well it works, but I thought it was just a great idea, especially in regards to TT. Because I don’t know how it is with you, but I can never remember on which sites I left comments that I might check again later to see if the blog owner answered me. You know, sometimes you ask questions in a comment, or there is a nice discussion going on and you tell yourself “I have to come back here later to see how it developed”. But, of course, if you have visited 20 other blogs meanwhile, you will just not be able to find the one you’re looking for again, unless you’re looking through them all once more.

This plugin now is supposed to help you keep track of all your comments. I will test it in the next few days and report back at a later date with my opinion of it.

13. The iFollow and the iReply movements

Both are pretty much self-explanatory. iFollow means that I have a plugin that deactivates the no_follow attribute for links in the comments. So, if you leave a comment on my site, it is a proper backlink to your site, one that search engines (and probably Technorati as well) will actually “count”.

iReply is about interacting with your visitors. It basically is the commitment to, as much as possible, reply to comments, and to encourage discussion.

And both have got nice buttons you can put in your sidebar.

(this one even comes in several nice colors)

As you will undoubtedly have noticed, I have only one of them in my own sidebar. I do think, both of them are things worth encouraging. But for me, the iReply thing should be a thing one can take for granted at a blog. It is common courtesy to reply to comments, or at least acknowledge them. So, considering the fact that I want to keep my sidebar as clutter-free as possible, I abstain from adding this button, but I fully endorse the notion.