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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
My Thoughts on Blogs
Blogs are pretty great. I seem to be addicted to them, since I’ve had at least five others in addition to this one at some point or another. I keep a livejournal, though I’ve gotten irregular at that. I have a Disney blog that I almost never post to (feelings that I’m a fraud and have no new insights or information to convey are fueling that one). I had a by-myself public blog that just lost steam because writing book reviews is boring, sharing recipes is boring (and I am far from being a true “foodie,” apparently, which made the whole thing discouraging), and various other attempts at having an active blog, well, just fizzled.
I do spend a lot of time on the internet. I like to browse. I don’t browse very far, though. I used to use stumbleupon which was a neat way of discovering things that I might otherwise never see, but after that very website led me to a site that compromised our laptop (which was running Windows at the time), I’ve given it up. (We now run Linux on all of our personal computers, but I still haven’t made it back to StumbleUpon). I generally now spend all of my time on a few websites or platforms. I hang out at HogwartsMOO, where I’ve had a character (or account, if you will) for going on eight years. I read threads on Ravelry and LibraryThing, though I very rarely post anything. I check in on DisBoards on occasion. I read my livejournal friends page and check up on Twitter constantly. That’s about it. There are a few others that I check in on occasionally, and I’ll get lost in Wikipedia or imdb sometimes, but I don’t generally do a wide variety of web browsing.
I think the main reason for this is that I like to see or experience certain things when I visit a website. Nearly all the websites I visit are blogs or at least have a blog now, and I like to read blogs. I love when people share their day-to-day with me, or offer insights into things that I might otherwise not have paid any attention to. Okay, to which I might otherwise have not paid any attention. Better? Okay.
When I do start reading a blog, I want certain things from it. I want a functional way to read old posts without having to go to a day or a month view. I want to read backwards, so there should be an “older posts” button. It drives me absolutely crazy when there isn’t one. It’s even worse when the number of entries on the main page is limited to a number less than ten. How will I find out if I like your blog if there are only three or four entries on the main page? That’s not giving me much of a chance to see the full scope of your blog. If none of the four visible entries look interesting to me, and I can’t read any others, I’m likely to just pass right on by without even giving a potentially interesting writer a chance. That’s sad.
Another blog-related gripe of mine relates to feeds. A good website with a blog should have a working feed that I can subscribe to via Google Reader (my reader of choice). I should be able to read the whole entry on the feed. I hate blogs that give me a teaser to a post but cut it off after a few sentences or even as much as half of the post. I’m likely not to subscribe to a blog that works its feed that way, or unsubscribe from it pretty quickly and then potentially forget to ever check the website again. Out of sight, out of mind, you know?
I guess what I’m really wishing for is a standard among blogs. Blog templates vary so wildly on wordpress alone, nevermind all the other blogging platforms out there. Perhaps I’m expecting too much, but I know if more people would declutter and employ usable themes and navigation links, would be far more likely to cultivate a circle of community, rather than sitting idly by most of the time and ignoring the other potentially interesting blogs around.
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