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Should Bloggers Know XHTML & CSS?

Inspired by John’s awesome post on how to bug check a blog yesterday, I thought I would ask you whether or not knowlege of XHTML/CSS is required for bloggers?

Part of the point of blogs, and the reason for their popularity is that you dont have to be tooooo technical to get started, but as blogging matures, and a new breed of professional publishers emerges, it seems that code is once again hip, and I’d argue that basic knowlege of how web pages work will give some of you an edge.

Proposal: A Short Course in XHTML/CSS Geared for Bloggers

Although there are a ton of html tutorials out there, I think we could benefit from a “quick and dirty” course, aimed at bloggers specifically. Here’s a few ideas/points

Geared toward bloggers entering posts, not designers building websites
Short, easy chapters
All in one “book” for easy reference

Aims:

To get bloggers to the point where they are comfortable working with various useful elements in html and css
Able to edit templates and tweak CSS files to produce unique themes based on existing designs

Let Me Know What You Think!

So, tell me if you think this would be useful, or if you think bloggers really dont need this knowlege. I wont mind, i’ll just think of something else to write about 🙂

Technorati Baseball Cards – Uber Linkbait

I caught Steve linking to Technorati’s new “baseball cards” feature this morning, and as im a nut for “keepng score” I just HAD to put in the Performancing Card. #26 eh? Pretty neat…

We don’t show up in the top 100 though,does that mean that i misread and we’re really #26,000 or is it because I’ve not ‘claimed’ this site? (it wont let me claim it either, weird…)

I’ve admired Technorati’s linkbaiting for a long time, ever since they bought out tags and started showing in all the engines for cool keywords — I mean, sheesh! How genius is that? Get half the entire blogosphere to link to you in every single post using exact anchor text. Marvellous.

Likewise with this new feature.

We have some similar things lurking in Performancing actually, but they’ve never been officially announced as we’re still tweaking them. Dont think most have spotted them…

HOWTO: Bug Check Your Blog

Sometimes it can be really difficult to track down bugs that cause your blog to display improperly? especially when the issue is not something you did in your template, but a mistake or typo in an actual post or TypeList.

The other day a question came in via comment on the FAQ page. Richard Murray was experiencing an issue that caused the text size in his blog to display larger in Internet Explorer than in other browsers. Oddly, when I viewed the blog in IE, I wasn’t able to replicate the issue. Bud suggested that it might be related to using keyword font sizing rather than specifying font sizes in pixels (MT uses keywords such as xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, and xx-large to describe font sizes and IE doesn’t respond well to these). But although that was a good guess, it wasn’t the answer either.

In the end, it turned out to be a pretty simple problem: an open tag in Rich’s code was causing all the text after the tag to display larger. I had a similar problem once when I failed to close a bold tag in a TypeList. The entire blog displayed in bold text until I figured it out, making it very difficult to read. This kind of error can be difficult to trouble-shoot. After all, one wouldn’t expect a typo in a TypeList to effect the display of an entire blog. I spent a lot of time digging around in my templates before figuring out where the problem was.

That’s why it’s a good idea not only to view your blog in all the major browsers, but to periodically run your site through an HTML validator. Here’s a list of resources you can use to make sure that your blog will display properly on all platforms and in all browsers.

Checking your template and page code:

The first two links here are services that you definitely should run your blog through every now and then to make sure it’s functioning properly for all your readers. I especially recommend using these after implementing any new hacks on your blog’s template code.

browsershots.org: This is a great service that allows you to view screenshots of your pages in different browsers, at different screen resolutions and with different plugins. Browsershots.org distributes the work of making browser screenshots among volunteer community members using a program to automatically make screenshots of web pages in their browser and upload the results to the server. So what you’re seeing is not a rendered guess at how your site will display? it’s an actual image of how the site looks on different platforms.

W3C Markup Validation Service: a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. Type in your URL, and the W3C will check the code to insure that everything is ship-shape. This is the best tool to use to check for things like tags that haven’t been closed.

Now, before you panic at the results, let me step out on a limb and suggest that the W3C Validator is just a wee bit overzealous at times. It doesn’t like the way that TypePad encodes line breaks for instance and will suggest that you go in and hand edit all of those. Nah? they’re wrong, but they work. Another thing that it will almost certainly take you to task on is whether you’ve used alt tags on all your images. I strongly suggest that you do (you’ll get way a lot more traffic from google images if you use alt and title tags) but it won’t adversely effect the display of your blog if you don’t.

If you’re not deeply familiar with HTML, It’s a good idea after checking your code to read up on each of the items the Validator lists and make an informed decision as to whether you must, should or might want to make the changes. A blog that is in perfect W3C compliance is definitely going to look the way you want it to on any platform, but it’s also important to balance perfection against practicality.

My suggestion? If you really wanted to fix something like all of your line break tags, use the Search & Replace tool found at the top of your listed entries. IMPORTANT: be careful when doing a replace, because there is no undo. If you are making a replacement in many of your entries, you may wish to first use the Export feature to back up your entries. Also, be aware that the Search & Replace tool can change both text and HTML in your blog. If you replace a term used in any links on your blog it will break the links and you’ll have to go back and fix that by hand.

The W3C also provides a number of more specific tools for checking the compliance of your code.

The Basics – what you should run on all your web pages

The MarkUp Validator: Also known as the HTML validator, it helps check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML, SVG or MathML.

The Link Checker: Checks anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document. Useful to find broken links, etc.

The CSS Validator: validates CSS stylesheets or documents using CSS stylesheets.

The above three can be used all-in-one by running the Log Validator. Unlike the others, this tool helps improve the quality of a whole site, step by step, by finding the most popular documents that need to be fixed in priority. Learn more about this method in the Web Standards Switch document.

Checking your RSS Feed

If you’re using the built-in feed that TypePad provides or running your feed through Feedburner, you won’t be likely to need these. But if you’ve created a comments feed or a feed for categories, you might want to run it through one or both of the following validators to make sure it’s functioning properly for all readers.

W3C Feed Validator: Check newsfeeds in formats like ATOM and RSS.

FeedValidator, works with RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. It also validates Atom feeds. If the validator finds any problems in your feed, it will give you messages for each type of problem and highlight where the problem first occurs in your feed. If you’re unsure what a message means, click the "help" link next to the message for a fuller explanation.

Extra Credit: Checking Security, Backwards Compatibility and
compliance with Section 508 Accessibility guidelines

And finally, for those of you who want to achieve maximum usability, here are some further resources. I suggest starting by taking a look at Mark Pilgrim’s free online e-book, Dive Into Accessibility: 30 days to a more accessible web site. The book explains why you should care about making your blog more accessible, and how you can do so. From the introduction:

To answer the first question, I will present character sketches of five people: Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus. These people have several things in common:

1. They all have a combination of physical, mental, and technological disabilities which make it more difficult to use the Internet.

2. Although fictitious, they all represent real people with disabilities, and they use the Internet in ways that real people with disabilities use the Internet.

3. They all have difficulty reading your web site.

To answer the second question, I will present 25 tips that you can immediately apply to your own web site to make it more accessible. Although these concepts apply to all web sites, I will be focusing on implementation using popular weblogging tools. If you use some other publishing tool or template system, you will need to determine how to implement the tips in your tool of choice.

Each tip will focus on a single concept, explain the reasoning behind it, and show who will benefit once you implement it. This is why the character sketches come first, because they change the tone of the first question from "Why should I bother?" to "Who benefits?" Answer: "Marcus benefits." "How does Marcus benefit?" "Well, let’s look at that…" And so forth.

Don’t panic if you are not an HTML expert. Don’t panic if the only web site you have is a personal weblog, you picked your template out of a list on your first day of blogging, and you’ve never touched it since. I am not here to tell you that you need to radically redesign your web site from scratch, rip out all your nested tables, and convert to XHTML and CSS. This is about taking what you have and making it better in small but important ways. Jackie, Michael, Bill, Lillian, and Marcus will thank you for your attention.

Tools you can use to test your blog for security, accessibility and backwards compatibility:

WebXACT: a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.

Delorie Software provides a number of free services to the web community to assist web authors who wish to make their information available to the largest audience. These tools provide alternate ways of viewing your pages, so that you can ensure that your content is received properly by all viewers.

Lynx Viewer: See how this browser views your page

Search Engine Simulator: See what the search engines see

Web Page Purifier: Restricts your HTML to published standards

Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer: See what your page looks like without support for various features

HTTP Header Viewer: Make sure your server is sending the correct MIME headers for your files.

HTTP Request Viewer: Find out exactly what your browser is sending to my server.

The government also provides a list of companies that provide 508 compliance software as well as further information on how federal agencies are working to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals.

Blogging For Influence

For many people the idea of starting a blog is to just get your thoughts “out there”. The hope would be that people would read those thoughts but that isn’t necessarily always the goal. Just having something to say, or maybe nothing of significance but still the drive to say it, is enough motivation.

Then something happens that changes your perception. You get comments. Feedback starts dribbling in. People react, both positively and negatively. Links start appearing praising or denouncing your opinions. At this point you recognise an important element of blogging; blogs have influence.

This influence is vitally important to keep in mind.

As a small example of this on my photography blog I had posted a review, perhaps an overly short and harsh review, of a photo printing service attached to an incredibly popular photo sharing site (you know the one). This morning I woke up to a message in my comments from a representative of the company offering me a reprint.

Obviously there is a good chance that had I emailed their customer service department I would have been offered the same, I have no reason to doubt their customer service is top notch. Had I just emailed the customer service representative and kept my opinions private though I would have been failing my readers. As it happens this wasn’t a quality control issue, it is a flaw in the product and the blog comment confirmed there is no other result possible. While the company will not like it I think warning readers to stay away from the item is the only thing I could do. While my blog has not the reach to do anything to the companies popularity at least there will be a few hundred people who do not waste their $50 on a sub-par product. What gives what I have to say more impact over and above my subscriber count though is all those readers

have their own blogs
are very active in the photography communities
are exactly the target market for those products
love to talk about (boost/trash) products and services

My audience might be small but it is laser-targeted. Think what would happen if I had the readership of one of the top 100 blogs? (Which is why I am not naming names right here, I have done enough damage, heh).

Recently there has been a meme going around about Techcrunch having “only” 53,651 subscribers. The idea seems to be that in the blogosphere this is thought of as a great achievement but that audience isn’t so hot in the context of the wider population of the internet.

I say, think again. It might only be 50,000 people but those readers are early adopters, sneezers, influencers, whatever you want to badge them they are important folk. If you want to start a viral effect those are the people to target. Bloggers are in a prime position to reach an incredibly potent audience.

The mood seems to be that blogs are not worth the high esteem granted them while ever the audience is not mainstream. I would say that blogs are important precisely because their audience is niche.

Are Feature Requests A Bad Thing?

Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users
is one of my favorite reads and was a big part of what inspired me to
start the TypePad Hacks project. Which is ironic, in a way, because
although I agree with Kathy on a lot of things, our take on feature
requests is totally opposed. Her recent post Don’t give in to feature demands! starts out:

The more successful the product or service is, the stronger the
pressure to give in to user requests. The more users you have, the more
diverse the requests. One user’s must-have-or-else feature is another
user’s deal-killer. And the more popular your product or service is,
the more those requests start turning into demands and ultimatums, and
finally very harsh criticisms.

The worst thing we can do is give in. But as the requests/demands
and criticisms become louder and angrier, the harder it is to resist
the siren callâ€” "But if we just added this one thingâ€¦ these guys would
ease up."

But when we’ve blended all the colors into one muddy blob, then
nobody hates us, and nobody is delighted, excited, or turned on by what
we do. We become mediocre. Usually the worst place to be.

She goes on to list 13 categories of "people who might
make feature requests or demands," and suggest how and when companies
should respond to them. It’s an interesting read. I recommend it for
regular readers here who have participated in the discussion of adding
features to TypePad.

Now, I get where Kathy is coming from when she says that trying
to do too many things can lead to mediocrity (or worse, even). At the
same time, I wouldn’t necessarily agree that the bulk of features fall
into a must-have/deal-killer dynamic. There’s hardly an app on my
laptop where I use all the features, but generally it doesn’t bother me that they do more

than I need them to. So long as the application remains stable,
reasonably fast, and the options are well-organized, I’m perfectly
willing to ignore what I don’t need. The place where I see a risk of
alienating one user to please another is not so much in adding features
as in changing them. Everyone gets frustrated when a new version
launches and they can’t find or use the features that had become second
nature. But new stuff? I don’t see an issueâ€¦

I suggest reading Kathy’s post for an alternate view on the issue.

Techcrunch & Flipping Burgers

BusinessLogs has a great take on the Techcrunch redesign.

A fair amount of digging and surmising comes to this:

What this says to me is that Michael gave her specific instructions on what he wanted it to look like (“newspaper-ish” comes to mind as a common client request), and although Rachel had her thoughts and ideas about what a new TechCrunch should look like, they were pre-empted by what Mike gave her as an instruction set. This happens a lot in client work, which I’m sure Rachel knows very well, and that’s the idea that no matter what vision you have in your head for a client’s site, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match their vision for the site.

To me, this is all to painful a memory. Designers are often treated like their skills are akin to flipping burgers at the local fast food chain. Why even hire a designer if you’re just going to dictate what you want them to do?

Most kids can build an html template, it’s easy. The skills you hire a designer for should be anything but the basic ability to piece html together.

Having said all that, I think he did a fairly good job on the ads, though some would clearly disagree.

Arrington could put 5 more ads on the site and I doubt he would notice a dropoff in traffic. The redesign would have to be a black background with black text before people finally gave up. You wonder why gas prices continue to go up? Probably becasue we keep on buying it no matter what.

A final thought from me: I HATE centered, fixed width designs. They suck to absolute high heaven and i always feel shortchanged by them. I would have expected better from such a site, and bearing in mind that Arrington appears to have designed this site and gotten some casual labour to implement it, I’d really of thought he’d have had a better grip on how to do such things.

Getting People to Comment on Your New Blog

How many of you have purposefully arrived a little late to a party to avoid the awkwardness of being the only one there, apart from the host(s)? How many online forums have you arrived at from search engines where the only topics are those by the forum owner, so you’ve refrained from posting a response? Probably a few. Now, how many of you might have got involved with some of those forums if there had been evidence of a bigger community? Again, I’m going to assume quite a few of you.

The same mentality applies to new blogs. We all tend to want to be heard by as many others as possible, so why would we comment on a blog with no other participants?

This leaves the owner of a new blog with a conundrum. How do you get people to comment on your site if they won’t do so until someone else does?

There are a few options you can try, although none are exactly perfect.

Comment yourself. This is the easiest option, but unless you’re adding something significant extra to your original entry you’ll look like you’re talking to yourself.
Pretend to be someone else. Pretty much the same as option one, but a little further along on the ‘sad-o-meter’.
Invite people to comment. Whether it’s inviting other bloggers in your niche, or just getting your mates to comment, sending an email invitation out can be one of the most effective ways to get a conversation going. A note on your friends – make sure they’re going to have something to add to the conversation. If something looks like a clique others will be put off.
Write Better Content. If you’re still not pulling anyone in, could it be your content just isn’t good enough to provoke discussion? Take a look back over everything you’ve written. Look for places it could be improved, and bear your findings in mind when you write your next entry. This will take the most time to achieve results, but is far and away the best for long-term results.
Provoke Controversy. Good old controversy. A time-honoured way to get people talking. Just remember to prepare for negative responses to whatever you write. Also referred to as “link-baiting”, controversial posts carry a risk of ruining any good reputation you might hope to achieve. My preference would be to avoid using controversy unless absolutely needed.

This list is far from exhaustive and are mostly just off the top of my head. What methods have you used for kicking off the conversations on your new blogs?

Launching A Blog

I’ve been experimenting with two different approaches to launching a new blog recently: just going live with it, and in contrast, build it up quietly, then launch.

It’s been interesting comparing the two methods and how they’ve affected my attitude towards the blog itself.

Doing it Quietly

Go! Chris! Go! is my new personal blog. Or at least it will be when I finally “push the button” and put it live. I’ve been quietly building it behind a password-protected curtain, writing content, tweaking design details and functionality… Doing the things we often hear recommended to us.

On the whole, I’ve found the process rather uninspiring. When you’re behind a veil where no one can see you there is less motivation to push yourself. Maybe I’m just finding this on this site because it’s a personal blog, but I’m sure I’ve felt this way on any site I’ve worked on. As such, I’m not making much (if any) process on the site and it’s close to being stillborn.

Until you’re in the public firing-line, when the praise and criticism are flying, you’ll never know if you’re going in the right direction or not. Ultimately, if you’re putting anything on the internet – this most public of public forums – it’s because you want other people to see it.

Just Do It!

By contrast, The Get Rich Project(GRP) was done in the most direct manner: a wordpress install, apply the Hemingway theme and write like there’s no tomorrow…

And write I have! In the last week I’ve managed more posts on the GRP than I have in a month on most of my other blogs. There is a lot more energy behind this blog than any I’ve worked on before and it’s proving to be great fun! Even for such a (usually) dry subject as personal finances.

An extension of this type of site launch is the so-called “live” redesign – where a website is redesigned in “real time” while people are still able to visit. I’ve done a couple of this type of redesign and in each case they’ve proven to be fun, enjoyable experiences.

When launching in this way, I made sure I had written a few decent posts before I started doing any of the usual “marketing” – del.icio.us, forums, etc. This way I should hopefully avoid the “empty shell” effect normally associated with launching in this fashion.

Not everything will be optimised off-the-bat, but I’d argue that no blog is optimised on launch – no matter how much planning you put into it. You just never know how people will react until it is in the wild. You can apply your own (and others) past experience as much as you want, but each blog is unique so you’ll never know for sure.

Give it a Go

Next time you have a blog to launch, consider trying the “just launch it” method. With maybe a little prior planning, starting-up this way can prove to be an effective way of igniting that extra little spark of passion that reminds you blogging is still as much about fun and “doing things different” as it is about business and making money.

I’m hoping to repeat the personal feeling of success I now have at the end of this first week of the GRP with two other blogs I now have in the pipeline.

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