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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