Sebbie on the Webbie

Archive for December, 2008

When I first heard about it last weekend, it made my stomach turn. I had just moved to a country that I thought was perfect in most senses – if the higher broad band prices and slower connections that I had gotten used to didn’t count. Internet to me is like a life line. It helps me breath easier. And now, they want to tell me that they want to control my breathing. They want to make sure, that I don’t say anything that they don’t approve. Seriously, if this bill goes through, we’re moving to New Zealand. (Prepare for a flood NZ!)

The politicians say this is to protect the children from harmful content on the internet. They want to filter out anything that is inappropriate for a 15 year old or younger, according to the ACMA regulations. Why don’t you just pass a law that parents have to install a content filter for their own computer if you insist on the child safety issue?

And if it is a ploy to protect the children, what about us that have none? If we want to watch porn online we should be allowed to! What about non-filtered ISP’s for people who don’t have children? Should parents who have children be still allowed to access the net unfiltered if they are not concerned with the “baddies” or are capable to filter the content themselves.

I agree that it might be wise to OFFER a filtered service, but should it be compulsory? Good heavens, no. That just as a mere thought is appalling and sends the message of a 3rd world country out to the rest of the world. Even if it did bring no relevant harm to the user, the mere thought of a filtered Internet goes against everything I believe in, and while the world is getting more and more tolerable and liberal, this kind of approaches don’t really go down do well in International image of Australia. Internationally, people won’t be interested HOW Australia does it or WHAT is filtered, all they will hear is “Australia sensors the Internet just like China” and that’s it. China, I tell you. The country that forged a child’s singing voice.

Now if you have ever seen the Google keywords and phrases that your blog is picked up with as search results, you may also raise this question. If my blog is found with phrase “child nudity porn” is it then filtered out completely? Rest assured, nowhere on this site, or any of my other sites, have I published child porn, but clearly, I have used the word, child, nudity and porn in one place or another, sometimes even in the same post. HOW is this content filtered anyway?

What really grosses me out on this is having moral values forced upon me, in a free democratic country! The Internet is the place where you can find support, friends, soul mates and be free & yourself, and that should include the possibility of viewing and sharing material that some people would find objectionable. Should this filter be installed, who will then control what is filtered out? One day it’s adult content, the next day it’s anti-religious material and then political issues… Content warnings on TV are enough to piss me off, but I understand them. TV cannot be filtered on a device level, but your computer can. I think we should keep it at that.

More on the topic by politicians and by Aussie Bloggers.

Few days ago, I followed a comment-link to read the blog of a person who left me a very interesting comment. What I found was a blog so badly designed I could not read it. I simply could not read it even tough I really really wanted to. I skimmed through some of the posts after setting my browser so that I could almost comfortably follow the lines of massive text, and found an entry that was wondering why the blog wasn’t doing too well. I found that this blogger had followed every rule in the book to get his blog out there… Exept what comes to designing blog layouts. This is the state that I found the blog in. I needed a total 27 screenshots to fit the front page onto a screenshot. 27 – I kid you not. So I contacted him directly to offer some insight to what might have effected his success as a blogger – the design. I thought it was such a shame seeing his beautiful writing being cluttered by all sorts of gadgets and widgets and thingamabobs, that you could not tell the header from a tag cloud. As it happened, I offered my help and he accepted, and we’ve been working together to improve his blog there on. I am truely happy he accepted my help as I think he makes a fantastic blogger.

Arguing with him over some design elements made me think about good web design and the beginner mistakes that I think everyone makes, especially if they are very keen on making their own layouts to start with. I know I had my era of using every possible font colour I could think of for the mere joy I knew how to change that colour. Fortunately that was 1998, and most people were still just as excited about the fact as I was, so nobody cared. In fact, I got compliments of my “3D-effect” on the website, created with the usage of different font colours! To amuse you, here’s the layout in question:

And yes, that is an animated cat on the top of the page. It was the times when you could not possibly design a website without adding animated gifs on it and “clipart” was blossoming.

Next thing of course was the fonts. What could possibly say more about your personality than the selection of fonts? And because you have a personality, you have to choose Comic Sans Ms, just like every other beginner out there. Having to let go of the crazy fonts and colours can be truly a emotionally painful growing experience. The web safe selection of fonts is just so boring! No personality, no nothing! But in the end we all give up – we hate the websites created with crazy fonts and realise that other people hate our website with crazy fonts.

These days the biggest temptation comes in the form of widgets. Put in a shout box, recent viewers of both MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog regardless of the fact that most visitors who show up on one will show up on the other, or the fact that they all came through EntreCard just to fly by your blog without reading a word and you want to reward those fleeters by giving them a drop back and some link love for dropping a card. Then you have to show your Alexa ranking, Technorati, SezWho and BlogCatalog rating. Your readers simply have to know where on earth your last visitors came from so you add that thing that shows the towns and countries of your visitors, Live Traffic Feed. You don’t see the tree from the forest any more, and the blog loads up like an old horse pulling a load of rocks uphill. However broad your band is, it is never broad enough to cater for all those widgets!

Furthermore, you have to understand that the bulk of the widgets have not been designed to help you or your reader. They are designed so that you would put a free link to their creators website onto your site. Most of them are utterly useless. Just because a widget is free to use, doesn’t mean you should use it. The same way as just because you can change the font colour, doesn’t mean you should. Just like just because you can spit for 5 meters doesn’t mean you should. Get where I’m going at?

There are a lot of free templates out there that you can pick and use as your blog template. Take advantage of them! You don’t have to do everything yourself. I have been educated in web design at a very respected school back in Finland, and I still use ready made templates just because it’s easy, convenient and frees up my time to do what is really important; Write. What I do with them is fiddle around with the colours and images to get a look that is more me. (This layout for example was grey. I don’t want grey, I want orange! And no, I don’t think this one is just perfect, no. Enough fiddling is enough for me. :p )

If you are new to blogging and web design, you will have to learn to control your enthusiasm. Running around franticly finding the next cool and hip gadget is going to drive you crazy and not necessarily drive you traffic – apart from away from your site. Every time you find a widget you want to use, stop to think: What value does this add to my reader? How is this going to help my reader to find what he wants from my site? If it is not beneficial to my reader, will it be really beneficial to me? If it is beneficial to me, is there a way I can use it without posting it to the blog? Like Alexa ranking. If your rank isn’t really good, I don’t understand why you should show it, unless you are selling advertising. If your ranking is good, then probably your comments area is blooming, so that possible advertisers know already that your blog receives engaged readership who take interest in your blog for longer than just dropping that EntreCard.

There are two rules you should follow when designing websites: Less is more and KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid. Unless you are doing an art project, in which case you are allowed to go nuts – but you knew that already. The trick is to break rules with style, but if you’re not sure what you’re doing, you’re better off just following the rules. You should be aware of one more thing. The net has a fashion. Blogs can get old fashioned. At the beginning of the year every blog had a Live Traffic Feed, and now… I can’t see them anywhere. Things change and you have to change with them, just like shopping for clothes.

Now that I got Pushhyarag2000′s blog into a readable state, he will have to teach me how to drive the traffic to a blog. Geesh that guy is like a goat herder getting people on his site!

Are you one of those people who add friends on social networking sites or blog catalogues to improve their exposure / readership / social status? YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME. Have you ever seen any rating for the amount of friends anywhere apart the number that shows how many friends you have? Have you ever considered the fact that having more than a 100 friends (depending on the type of network the number can be larger. Ie. Flickr as pointed out in the comments) on your list will seriously effect your credibility, unless you really ARE famous? Like it’s okay for Britney Spears to have 100000+ friends on her MySpace profile (if she has one) but if you’re more like Sally Nextdoor, having more than a hundred tells people that you are desperate for attention, you don’t have real friends, you don’t know the meaning of friends, and that you are currently spamming a lot of people with your personal crap.

If you think that having your profile picture displayed together with tons of other profiles will bring you traffic, you’re wrong. Do you know ANYONE who browses friends of friends beyond the Top Friends? I certainly don’t. So if you don’t have a real relationship with the person on your friend list, you won’t gain any advantage of it, quite the opposite.

This goes with BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog as well. The more friends you have, the less value YOU have to people you add. Why would anyone want to be one of your thousand friends? They know you don’t care. They know you won’t remember 15 minutes from the time you added them that you did. All you put out is negative vibes, as everyone knows you don’t have time to follow all these blogs even if it was the only thing you did in your life – and that would make you officially pathetic if you did.

The more popular you are in reality, the less you tend to make “add me” requests, because you don’t have to. You don’t have to beg for attention, and you start to clear out the bulk from your friends list to keep only those you really are interested in. That shows your real friends you give value to them, and it shows people you wish to know, that you are not over worked by the number of people you have to socialise with so that they too may have a chance to actually getting to know you.

If anyone has a real good reason to do this, and it being so popular I would imagine someone has some rationale behind it, please do share if you dare!

I’ve been thinking about redesigning the site for ages now, and I finally got around to picking and tweaking a new theme. There are still things all over the place, but I’ll have to do some real work now… I could easily spend the rest of the day fixing little details, but have to move on. *Convincing herself to leave it alone*.

I hope you all like it!