Well, you knew this was coming. Part one of the challenge was zooming in on the blogroll, assuming that your blogroll was even IN your sidebar of course. Part 2, today’s challenge, is to go through the rest of sidebar with a fine toothed comb and de-clutter it. This is one of the ideas based on ProBlogger’s tips that I knew was going to be included the moment I saw it. One thing to remember here is that de-cluttering does not necessarily mean removing things. It’s a matter of looking at each item you have there, considering whether it belongs in your sidebar or not, whether it is taking up more space than it deserves, whether it’s function is being duplicated elsewhere or could be consolidated, and whether there may be another way to achieve the same goal in a more efficient way.

If you’ve been following this challenge, then you’ve already added a few things to your sidebar. I think having a translate option is important and is going to stay. The Clustrmap is more of a vanity item than anything else, but it does an effective job of demonstrating the reach of your community geographically and I’m choosing to keep. Obviously, that’s a personal choice. I’m not going to preach that you should have a short sidebar or a long one, or what belongs there and what doesn’t. However, I do believe that what’s there should be deliberate and efficient in terms of space and form, especially considering how many options are out there.

For example, in my sidebar right now I have a Facebook badge, I have a ShowYourself badge, a Twitter widget, and a FriendFeed widget. The ShowYourself badge has a link to my Facebook profile and my FriendFeed widget displays my Twitter status updates, which seems kind of ridiculous now that I think about it. I’m going to eliminate them all. No, I’m not going to stop linking to those things and displaying my status, but I’m going to take advantage of a tool that Sue Waters (who is the spiritual co-author of this challenge!) recommended to me called Retaggr. It provides a nice clean badge that will give me almost all the functionality that those four items provided, but in one nice and neat package. It’ll have links to all my social sites, like the ShowYourself badge. It includes my headshot, company, and link to Facebook like the Facebook badge did. It will also display my most recent tweet, which is plenty. If people want to see my last 10 tweets, they can visit Twitter. The only thing I’m losing out on is that the FriendFeed badge displayed when I’ve uploaded photos or videos as well, which is pretty sporadic to be honest. Ideally, I’d love it if Retaggr would display my most recent post on Twitter OR Plurk, but that’s ok. I think the benefit far outweighs the few things it lacks.

There are a few widgets that I have that just don’t make the cut. I have a Now Reading plugin that shows what my ‘reading’ status is. However, it only works as well as my maintenance habits, which are poor when it comes to that. I never remember to update it so I have a choice: Change my habits, or just get rid of it. I don’t feel it’s that important, so it’s going bye-bye.

For the widgets that you’ll be keeping, bear in mind that there may be new versions of them available, or third party options that you could swap them out for. For example, check out all of these different Twitter widgets that are available. And that blog post is from a year ago! Many sites also offer you the opportunity to modify the color schemes for a widget, enabling you to try to blend it in a little closer to your chosen theme. You may find it worthwhile to give a few ‘keeper’ widgets a makeover as part of this challenge.

While we’re at it, let’s talk Archives. Typically there are only three ways somebody visiting your blog can find your posts once they’ve scrolled off the front page: 1) Search 2) Categories 3) Archives. I do think they’re important to keep around, but once you’ve been blogging for a few months, they start to take up a HUGE amount of space. However, that’s an easy one to do something about. Most blogging engines now have an option to shrink your archives down to a drop down list. So instead of it taking half the page, it’ll only take up a line or two. Unfortunately, that option is usually relatively hidden. In WordPress (and EduBlogs), you have to find the archive Widget and click Edit and the option will pop right up. In Blogger, it’s pretty similar. Go to Layout -> Page Elements and choose to edit the Blog Archive gadget. Lots of options there, including changing it to a drop down box. Very very easy thing to do in order to save a lot of real estate in your sidebar.

Finally, there are three things that I think you need to make sure are somewhat obvious in your sidebar: A search bar, a way to contact you and a way to subscribe to your blog. I never understand why some bloggers don’t have a search bar on their blog. It makes me leave their blog and jump through some Google hoops just to find information they’ve written that I know is there! As I mentioned above, there are precious few ways to find your content once it has scrolled off the front page. Don’t make it more difficult for your readers.

Contact information seems like a no-brainer, but I’m always stunned by how many blogs I visit don’t provide any way to make direct contact besides leaving a comment and hoping they see it. Some of you put your contact information in your About Me page. That’s fine, but if you did so, you should also have SOMETHING in your sidebar that clearly states, “This is where you can go to contact me” and then points to the About page. Once again, if somebody reads your blog and wants to communicate with you, you want it to be easy for them to do so.

Same thing goes for subscribing. Now, if you did the Feedburner challenge, then this should be a non-issue. But step back and verify that in your sidebar there is an obvious way for people to subscribe to your blog. Your RSS or Feedburner icon should not be so subtle that people can’t find it. I recently visited a very prominent blogger and was flabbergasted that there was no RSS link available. I had to view his source code in order to find out what his RSS feed. That’s inexcusable on a blog. So double, triple check to make sure that your RSS feed is represented in your sidebar and that it points to the right one if you signed up for Feedburner.

Just for the sake of an example, I’m going to leave my blog’s sidebar as-is for the rest of the day, and then will fix it up as I’ve outlined here tonight. Enjoy the mess for now, it’ll be a leaner, meaner sidebar soon

I have to admit, the comments on these posts have been phenomenal. So don’t be shy here, did I miss anything? Is there anything you consider a ‘must-have’ for your sidebar, or that you think is a faux pas that bloggers often commit? Got a great widget that you think would add value or make people’s sidebar content more efficient? Share some of your favorites as well as the ones you hope to never see again! Also, if you’d like to get some feedback on your sidebar, share a link to your blog and I”m sure people would be willing to take a look.

Related Reading on Teach42

• Blogging Pro Theme
• Be a Better Blogger in just 30 Days
• Day 9: Burn Baby Burn! Your Feed, That Is
• Day 5: Globalize Your Blog
• Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit

One of the more confusing aspects of blogging is RSS, but that’s truly the heart and soul of a blog. Without the RSS feed, you just have a web page. Your RSS feed allows people to subscribe to your content via aggregator or email, or allows you to take your content and republish it in a variety of ways. For example, it’s what allows you to announce your blog posts on Facebook or on FriendFeed and so on. Your feed is an absolutely critical piece of your blog and you always want to make sure it’s functioning, happy and standards compliant.

While just about every blog engine out there supports RSS, most are fairly basic feeds. They do the job, but not much more than that. Of course, that begs the question, what else would you like your RSS feed to do? Wel, for one thing you might want to engage in podcasting. Most people don’t know it, but it’s your RSS feed that takes a link to an MP3 file and turns it into an actual podcast. It realizes that you’ve linked to an MP3 file and then adds in some special code that let’s podcatchers like iTunes know how to get access to the audio file. Interestingly, it doesn’t just do it for audio files. PDF’s, Video files, and documents of all sorts caqn be sent out via a podcast. That is, if your RSS feed handles the data right. And that’s barely the tip of the iceberg.

While most RSS feeds are just adequate, Feedburner is a free service that can take an adequate feed and make it superior. I’ve been using Feedburner to remix my feed for about 4 years now and can’t recommend it more highly. There’s a few reasons that I suggest using Feedburner to upgrade your feed, but the biggest is a very simple practical one. Bloggers move around sometimes. You may start on Blogger, then move to EduBlogs.org and then wind up hosting your own someday. Who knows? Maybe you’ll start off on your own and then move to a school server. You never know what the future is going to bring. Typically, every time you move your blog you’d need to alert all of your readers that your RSS feed is changing. They need to unsubscribe from your old feed, and then subscribe to your new feed. While some people will do so, more than likely you’ll lose readers that way. If you have people subscribing to a Feedburner feed instead, you just change were Feedburner gets it’s information from and your readers are unaffected.

Let me step back just a little bit and ensure you understand what I mean on this one. Typically your blog engine (Blogger, EduBlogs, WordPress, Blogmeister) creates your RSS feed. When you sign up for Feedburner, you supply them the link to your RSS feed and then they give you a shiny new Feedburner feed. Then you hide all instances of the original feed and make sure that everybody is subscribing to your Feedburner feed. The feedburner feed passes along the EXACT same information, but it mixes it and mashes it up to make it more standards compliant, enables all sorts of additional features, allows you to keep a closer eye on your subscriber data and more. So it’s just a shiny new version of your original feed, but with a new address.

I’m not going to take you step by step how you sign up for feedburner, because they already have some great walk thru’s for it, depending on your blog engine. This page has quick start guides for Blogger, WordPress, Typepad and MySpace. Sue Waters has a phenomenal write up of how to add Feedburner to your EduBlogs blog. And for the record, most of her steps will work just fine on other WordPress blogs.

Once you’ve signed up for Feedburner and have your shiny new Feedburner link, there’s two things that you need to do in order to make sure that people find that instead of your old feed. The first is add a Feedburner chicklet to your sidebar. Log into your Feedburner account and go to the Publicize tab. One of your choices is the Chicklet Chooser. Follow the steps there to create a chicklet that appeals to you. Grab the code and paste it somewhere in your sidebar so that people can find it. Then glance through your sidebar to make sure that you don’t see any other references to your old RSS feed. At this point, I would also suggest that you alert your current subscribers to switch over to your new and improved feed. If they don’t, no worries for now. They’ll still receive content via your old feed. It isn’t turned off or anything. But you do want to encourage them to move over to the new one.

The second thing you need to do is fix your auto-discovery options. If you use Firefox , Flock, Opera, IE7 or Safari , you may notice certain notifications when you’re visiting web pages that have RSS feeds. When that icon appears, that means that there’s subscribable content on that page. Clicking on the RSS icon takes you to a page that gives you a variety of ways to subscribe. However, we want to make sure that it’s providing ways to subscribe to the NEW Feedburner feed. If you use an official redirection service like a WordPress Plugin (same goes for Edublogs) or Blogger’s Feedburner redirection service, then no worries, it should handle it for you. In Typepad, you can connect your Typepad blog to Feedburner and then it’ll handle it for you. If you use anything else, you may need to edit your template yourself to do this part. While it may seem intimidating to do so, it’s not that complicated. Just a matter of tweaking a few lines of code. This blog post will show you how.

So today’s challenge is to upgrade your RSS feed to Feedburner today. It’s one of those things that may seem like a pain the first time you do it, but trust me when I say that you will never regret it. It’s well worth the effort in the long haul. If you’ve already upgraded your blog to Feedburner, then use this as an excuse to browse through the site and see what options have popped up since the last time you visited. Most people set up Feedburner and then promptly forget all about it. Did you know that you can mix in events from your Google Calendar? Or add icons allowing people to forward on your articles, promote them on Digg, or GeoTag them for you? Is your Creative Commons license in your feed on and up to date (not everyone actually VISITS your blog)? Are you allowing readers to subscribe via email? Feedburner is adding features all the time, take a few minutes to flip through the features you may not have seen recently.

If you have any problems with this challenge, let us know via comments below. I’ll do my best to try to point you in the right direction. Also, don’t forget to add yourself to the 30D2BBB Wiki, so people know who you are and where your blog is. That way we can all try to support each other!

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Related Reading on Teach42

• Teach42.com is moving!
• RSS, Feedburner, and the future of feeds
• Time for some change
• Bring the blogs to the masses
• You know you want to start edublogging, so why wait?