Teach42

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Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit

Well, today’s challenge is the first of a two-parter. The longer you have a blog, the more cluttered your sidebar winds up. New social site? New widget! And it all adds up. Pretty soon your sidebar is a veritable circus of colors, banners and links. It’s time to reign it in, but if we’re going to do it we should do it right. And that means taking a thorough look at what we have there, determining what can be eliminated, what can be consolidated, and what should be… pruned. Which leads us to your blogroll.

The blogroll is one of the most popular sidebar items with good reason. It let’s people know who you read, where you get your information from and who you recommend to other people. There are many tools that make it easy to keep up… But therein lies the problem. For example, I use Bloglines for my blogroll. Anytime I add an EdTech blog to my aggregator, *bam* it appears in my blogroll. Delicious, Google Reader, and many others allow you to do the same thing. Trouble is, that means it’s just a little too easy to keep adding blogs to it, and after a while it sorta of loses it’s value. Looking at my blogroll as it stands right now, it’s just a series of links to a bazillion EdTech blogs. Unless it’s deliberate, it’s meaningless. So it’s time to do some trimming.

There are several ways to do a blogroll. WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and Edublogs all support blogrolls natively. Or you can use third party tools like Google Reader, Bloglines, Delicious, or any number of others. To be honest, the tool that use doesn’t matter so much. The important thing is selecting what you want to list there, and how you want to organize it. Do you want to list a few of your favorite blogs to read? Do you want to list bloggers that you admire? Perhaps you just want to share your favorites in a specific niche, like Special Ed or ESL. Really, it’s entirely up to you and there’s no wrong way to do. So long as you do it deliberately and maintain it.

Maintain it? Absolutely. Sometimes good blogs go stale. And if the blogger hasn’t posted since 2006, does it really still deserve a spot on your blogroll? Most likely not. While your pruning, you just might find yourself feeling a little guilt. You really like ‘John’, but you haven’t read his blog in who knows how long. Should he still be in your blogroll? In my opinion, if you even have to wonder, go ahead and take it out. If you share a sprawling list of 50 blogs there, it’s overwhelming and deters people from exploring them. If you have a concise list of 10 blogs, people see that these are personal recommendations from you and will be more prone to clicking through. It’s more meaningful that way. So don’t feel guilty. It’s your blog darnit! Do what you need to do. And if you’re going to have more than 10-15 of them, consider breaking them up into multiple categories so they’re more manageable.

If you don’t have any you want to remove any, at least do a ‘freshness’ check to make sure all of the blogs you’re linking to are still up and are active!

Good luck! And don’t forget, if you haven’t joined the wiki yet, stop by and list yourself there. And get ready for tomorrow, when we give the rest of your sidebar the royal treatment!

And now I’m off to do some trimming myself!

Day 10: Do you see what they see?

Today it’s time to take a very close look at your blog in a very broad way. Presumably you see your blog pretty often. But let’s face it, how often do you visit your blog from the same browser, on the same computer, using the same monitor with the same resolution settings? That’s a pretty narrow viewpoint! Today’s challenge is to do nothing more than look at your weblog! Sounds easy, right? Well it is… sorta.

We’re going to do a browser and RSS check across multiple operating systems if possible. I want you to see what your blog looks like on both Windows and Macintosh computers, specifically checking it on the following browsers: Firefox (OSX and Windows), Internet Explorer 6 (Windows), and Safari (OSX). You should also check out your RSS feed in your aggregator of choice. Bonus points will be awarded for going the extra mile and checking out your blog in any of the following browsers: Opera (OSX and Windows), Flock (OSX and Windows), Chrome (Windows), Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (Windows) and Safari (Windows). Don’t worry about mobile versions, we’ll be coming back to that later in the month. Extra bonus points for changing the resolution of your monitor and seeing what your blog looks like in various standard resolutions like 800×600, 1024×268 and so on…

If you’ve never tried a different browser than the one that came on your computer, then this is a great opportunity to give it a whirl. Firefox is a good one to start with. Just visit Firefox.com, click download and install it. It will import all of your current settings, and then you can give it a trial run. If you like it, then just choose Firefox whenever you have some surfing to do. If not, just use it to see what other people are seeing on your blog so you can identify potential problems.

What we’re looking for here is issues in your blog’s theme. Does everything look consistent between different browsers? Is anything sticking off the edges, or look scrunched up? Anything falling off the page, or hard to read because of color schemes? What you really want is for all readers to experience your content the same way across all computers and browsers. Keep a notebook handy because more than likely you’ll have some writing to do. Don’t forget that your blog contains more than just a front page. Spot check other pages like your About page, archives pages and a single post page (clicking through to view an individual post). Sometimes one page will look great, but another may have an issue.

Here are some screenshots I took while doing this for Teach42. I noticed a bunch of minor problems, mostly related to plugins that I have enabled like Related Comments and Zemanta, but I also noticed two major problems. 1) My footer is shifted over to the right on ALL browsers! No idea what’s causing that one. 2) On Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, and ONLY that browser, My blog is a two column blog instead of three columns. It took the content in the right skinny column and dropped it below the left skinny column. Why? Not sure! I’m going to have to do some research.

Let’s face it, knowing is half the battle. Today’s challenge is to KNOW. Don’t stress about solving all of the problems you find today, although you can if you want to obviously! But take your time and get yourself a good list of outstanding items you need to figure out. If you feel comfortable tweaking code, then maybe you want to try to fix them yourself. If you don’t, maybe you want to ask your PLN for some help or leave a comment here and see if anyone can help you. Or you could even go so far as to change to a different theme if it’s a MAJOR problem. Of course, depending on the severity, you can also feel free to just ignore the problem. Believe me, I know there are times when it’s just not worth the trouble to get a picture shifted over a few pixels and such. But at least make that decision deliberately, rather than out of ignorance.

I did mention that you should also look at your blog through an aggregator. Full credit goes to Sue Waters on that one. After yesterday’s challenge, she suggested having everybody subscribe to their own feed to see what it looks like. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a great exercise to make sure it looks like you THINK it does. She has two related posts that are worth browsing through on this topic. One note about this one, it’s possible to display either your full posts or just a teaser blurb in your RSS feed. Sue strongly recommends that you display your FULL posts in there so that people don’t need to click through in order to read your content. While I do agree with her, and do so myself, I don’t feel nearly as strongly about it. Some people prefer to just put out a teaser because then people actually have to VISIT their blog. If you put a lot of time into the look and feel of your blog, as well as adding things like ClustrMaps, sidebar widgets and so on, you probably want people to actually SEE the blog itself. By forcing people to click through in order to read the entire article, you do increase your site traffic and the potential that people will spend some time exploring your site. Really, it’s a personal decision. And while I prefer to display full posts, I can see the merits to both sides of the decision.

By the way, while you’re doing this challenge, keep an eye on your sidebar. What you like about it, what you don’t and such. We’ll be coming back to that in a few days.

Clearly when I did my searching, I found a few issues that need to be corrected. Did you? Any surprises lurking between browsers and operating systems?

Checking Teach42 across different browsers:

Safari, OSX