Get ten people to visit your blog and want to return repeatedly is better than 100 people just visiting and clicking straight out of it. Many blogs have flashing lights, bells and whistles. There is no structure just eye distracting nonsense everywhere.

If you have good content, and it is the content that will get people to return than don’t distract them from it. Steve Krug has written a fantastic book called Don’t make me think! it is basically about web usability, and it is full of ideas to make a website better, which in many cases also apply to a blog.

Another problem that many people do not think about, however, do commonly is send people away from their blog. How! people may ask? With hyperlinks that are not opened in a new page or tab. Imagine someone visits your blog, and you have a link to another site, blog or whatever, if the link displays the page on the one they had opened you have just shown them different content. After following that content, they may not return to yours. To open a link in a new tab or page the html code is target=”_blank” this is added to the end of the URL. Blogger does not do this by default so it will need to be added in the html code.

Slow loading graphics is another thing that can make people leave, the internet stores information that is available instantly (depending on your connecting speed). With the click of a button you can jump from blog to blog. People will not wait too long for a page to load before they click out of it. Images can be reduced in both dimension and file size, with many programs such as PhotoShop and Gimp by saving the image for web devices.

Many blogs also add things that many people do not understand such as recent viewers, this can be useful if you want to see who is visiting, remember though it will show the latest viewers from one community it is not a true indication of what traffic you are receiving. If the latest visitor from a community was five days prior and people see that they may think the blog is not that interesting and leave. This may also apply to hit counters and the like, if you really feel you like them then place them at the bottom of the page.

In conclusion, blogging really is about getting people to read what you have to say if not why blog, keep it on your PC. You want people to visit and return try everything within your control to have them stay long enough to read your latest post title.

Reprinted with permission from: Ardan’s Blog Talk: When is content not king?

I’ve previously posted about the .NET Framework Assistant add-on that was delivered via Windows Update earlier this year. It’s recently surfaced that it has a serious security vulnerability, and Microsoft is recommending that all users disable the add-on.

.NET Framework Assistant Blocked to Disarm Security Vulnerability at Mozilla Security Blog

Speaking to a group of British broadcasting executives via video link, Eric Schmidt said he could, however, imagine niche providers of content such as business news succeeding in this area.

Schmidt was responding to an announcement by News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch that he could start charging for content online.

Google CEO questions Murdoch’s online pay plan | Technology | Reuters

A website called Kickstarter.com is making it possible for people like this to raise sums ranging from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars to fund anything that captures the imagination of Internet users with a little money to spare.

Got a dream but no cash? The Internet can help | Technology | Reuters

Dodgytimes has reported that Asus president Jerry Shen said it’ll have an e-book reader in its Eee PC range for Christmas.

We got in touch with our contact inside Asus where the story was confirmed. It’s just one of the concepts to come out of Asus’s WePc.com initiative, apparently. That’s a community design website with the tagline ‘You Dream it, Asus Builds it, with Intel inside” - all of which speaks for itself.

This could very well mean the ‘EeeBook’ will be powered by an Intel processor, seeing as how it is the key partner in the programme.

Asus confirms an eeebook - The Inquirer

If you change the link in the application settings, it affects all of the historical tweets generated by the application. So it’s pretty quick and easy to experiment with different URLs and see what happens. I wonder if it’s possible to get rid of that pesky nofollow attribute? Let’s see what happens if we change our ‘Application Website’…..

Massive Twitter Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability

Battered by the constant rain of the third summer in a row which never actually arrived, the embittered populace of Rip-off Britain finally has something to smile about. Though being the suspicious lot that we are, we can’t help but look for the catch.

Windows 7 uk pricing shocker - The Inquirer

I used to laugh at the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS people, with their silly keyboard templates and inscrutable function-key combinations—I had proper menus and italic text that really looked italic! Of course I also had slow scrolling speeds in graphics mode to view those italics, and bizarre text transitions that would happen when you deleted invisible formatting commands.

Word for Windows 1.1 was a delight with the transition to a GUI interface, then Word for Windows 2.0 both pleased me with a bevy of new features and frustrated me because it took twice the RAM just to get up in the morning. (Macintosh Word 6 users, I’m sure, have no sympathies). Word 95 was really just Word 6 with red squiggle spell checking and long filenames, and after that things pretty much stayed the same until Word 2007, when Microsoft changed the entire user interface because it was getting too hard to find all the new features they kept cramming in.

Microsoft Word, RIP: 1983 - 2009 - Ars Technica

-Andreas

Enjoy
-Andreas