The Death of The Boring Blog Post?

is as close to a “must-read” as is possible.

For my direct purposes – I started blogging to write about disaster preparedness and related issues at Popular Logistics - anything too much fun, or whimsical, would be, I think, in poor taste. Which is no excuse for bad design; and I’m certainly trying to make improvements.

But for content either mordant or whimsical, there’s no reason for every post in a blog to necessarily have the same layout. Donnelly’s essay is especially fun to read because of its own layout, which includes a  lot of examples.

Also – Smashing Magazine – which is the meta-uber power tool set, the Vampire Slayer site for anyone wanting to learn something new about web design (it’s often one of my first stops)

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1. Wikipedia entry;  Scott McCloud.com.

Skelliewag is a blog about blogging – a “Meta-Blog” – and it’s excellent. We’ll let Skellie describe herself:

Skelliewag is a blog about planning, creating and growing the online projects you’re obsessed with. If you have big ideas that keep you awake at night (in a good way), this is written for you.

Who is Skellie?

Skellie is a blogger, writer, occasional entrepreneur, sometime freelancer and Envato worker-bee. Most of all she likes to build things on the web. You can follow her on Twitter.

Elsewhere, Skellie describes the blog this way:

Skelliewag is for bloggers, freelancers and entrepreneurs who think outside the box. If you want to make a living from your passion, not AdSense, this is written for you.

I realized today – looking at some old notes – that I hadn’t looked at Skelliewag in a while, and was rewarded with her beautiful redesign and some posts well worth reading:

• The Three Ds That Will Make or Break Your Blogging Career – Desire
  
• 30 Days to Become a Freelancer (inspired by ProBlogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog program)
• 10 Bloggers Share Their Best Post Ever

And there’s even more. I guess I’m going to have to figure out this Twitter thing so I can keep track of Ms. Skellie.

Skelliewag.

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Mr.  Roua’s blog, Dragos Roua – The choice of a personal path, uses the Thesis theme. Uses it in an oustanding way, and worth the visit if only for that reason.

Let me take this opportunity to point out what I think is a recurring ethical dilemma  in blogging. Maybe it’s just because I need more coffee.

Mr. Roua’s blog, and this blog here – WordPressBlue – are both members of, and more importantly in this case, affiliates of Thesis.

He wrote the great post I”m sending you to (or trying to). So when I reference the Thesis theme in this post – whose affiliate code should I use? He’s created all the value added – I just noticed it and posted about it.

For the purposes of this post, anyway (and I think the fresh pot of coffee is probably ready) – I’ve used his afffiliate code.Here’s a sample about what’s excellent in this post, Everything he has to say about production and promotion makes an awful lot of sense to me. One gem:

2. Make A Mindmap Of Your Blog

Keep a bird-eye of your blog. Putting your blog into a mind-map, with posts, categories, promotion and income sources proved to be an enlightening exercise for me. Not only it offered a totally different image of my blog but gave me a lot of ideas for overall improving.

To this next idea I’ll add – having been an editor, an author, a copy editor, and ghostwriter – it’s very hard to proof and edit one’s own work.

27. Read Your Own Blog

Too often ignored. You must be your first reader. Whenever I have some free time I read some of my older posts. There’s nothing narcissistic in it, on the contrary, most of the time I dislike what I wrote, and think I could have done it so much better.

It’s not “just another WordPress weblog” (the default tagline which comes with a new WordPress installation, along with the “Hello World” default post.

41. Your Blog Header Is Your Identity

Pay attention to your blog header, that’s where the blog title is usually placed. People will remember your blog by visually recreating that zone. If it’s too crowded it will be hard to memorize. I Always recommend to keep your header as clean as possible, in order to be easily remembered.

Here’s one comment that jumped out at me as very helpful. Gloson, apparently a regular reader, posted as follows:

[Gloson refers to his own post],  7 More Things to Do to Improve Your Blog.But I think your list is far more comprehensive than mine. LOL

And since you usually reply to almost every comment on your blog, one way you could improve it is installing this “Subscribe to comments” plugin. Hopefully it will improve interactiveness.

Certainly my experience is that it’s easy to forget that you’ve entered a comment on a post – and by extension joined conversation. If I understand correctly, this post allows the reader/commenter to return to her/his other work – and be “paged,” as it were, when the conversation heats up again.

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Improve Your Blog Typography with Typogrify

A Few Tips On Paragraph Length (a  question which should be considered, in my view, in conjunction with the question – how many lines or words before using the “more” tag? The people at Blogging Tips have worked that through with an elegant balance: enough of a post that one can make a reasoned decision about whether to go to the end of the piece, but no so little that one has to make a guess on the basis of the first sentence or two. Which makes more sense in the context of breaking news than in a special-purpose, self-defined audience outlet).

6 Twitter Directories To Add Yourself To (We here note that we know this is important, but haven’t gotten to it yet – neither this nor any of the other SEO-related things we need to address. That said – this post seemed a good place for bloggers to learn about Twitter).

An excellent piece about the development of blogging: 500 years of Newspapers – How many years of blogs?

Plus:

• three WP themes on the house (is that a New York idiom, like “on the arm?” We mean “free,” but have an aversion to writing copy in which the words “three” and “free” are adjacent. If you’re writing copy in radio news, you only need to make this mistake once to learn from it).
• Active user forums
• Useful Links which are  actually quite useful - and there seems to have been a conscious attempt to avoid the appearance of an editorial conflict of interest, which is a good thing. With a different group of people, this would have been seized upon as an opportunity to self-promote.

There’s also lots of white space – somehow an uncluttered feeling, and reading a post isn’t made difficult by the site design. I didn’t realize it at first, but the use of tabbed navigation in the sidebars seems to triple the useful space.

Finally – all of the posts about copy and copy editing are outstanding.  I hope I’ve correctly listed the Blogging Tips writers who write about writing:

• Patti Stafford from Patti Stafford (for example, Respect Your Readers and the contrarian post Give your writing a natural flow by combining sentences (We recommend Jonathan Vos Post: Raymond Chandler’s Hamlet not only for its excellent sentences, but because it’s funny. Especially if you like Shakespeare. Or mysteries. Maybe both). If you’re feeling discouraged, or someone you care about is, check out Rejection: It Happens to the Best.
  

• Patricia Vennes from Writer’s Rants (those who find English punctuation counterintuitive or difficult – and lots of very bright people do – are advised to read and bookmark It’s, its, it is, Huh?; her version of Hello world! is an introduction to her blog, not the default WP post; and this post, we predict, is going to lead to the novel from which is excerpted published:  Excerpt from 2086: An Unauthorized BioRev Novel, by Yours Truely (the misspelling in the title is,  we believe, intentional; let’s have no complaining about that).
  

Those are just two of the dozen or so contributors to Blogging Tips, which will be added, in short order, to our blogroll.

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