I decided to do something different this Saturday!Never mind the cute stuff, lol... what can I give you that will (hopefully) improve your life and enrich your blogging experience?Pink Saturdays are all about celebrating the colour PINK, and to me Pink-ness is also a state of mind: happy, serene...
I'm always up for visiting other blogs, and with so many Pink Saturday members it's becoming quite daunting, so I take it in sections. Beverly lists the blogs in blocks of 10, so I deal with one block at a time and generally zip along happily. Sometimes I start from the top down, or the bottom up, or close my eyes and jab my finger on the screen...
Q: Do I need to speed up my blog loading time?
A: Check out this Stopwatch link and find out!Nobody wants a slow-loading blog - especially for those still on dial-up. You can lose a lot of readers this way. So what can you do to speed things up? These are the two main culprits:
BLOG BACKGROUNDSDo you have a blog skin (a CSS sheet) loaded to prettify and bling up your blog? Did you know that if you load this at the BOTTOM of your blog it will help your blog to load faster?
Go to Layout > Page Element and scroll down to the very bottom of the page, and you'll see a box saying Add A Gadget, just like your usual sidebars. Drag&drop your blog background there, and it'll look exactly the same - but load a lot faster!
MUSIC WIDGETSThese can really slow your blog down.
If you didn't see it before, here's my previous post about it and
how to fix this.
PlayList now blocks anyone not based in the US from hearing their music due to copyright issues. This means anyone with
PlayList music set to play automatically on their blog will freeze up those computers! For me (in the UK) this means my entire computer is locked down for over 5 minutes (and I'm on 8-meg broadband) and if they have their comments set to appear on the page below the post, that's another 5 minutes or so of very frustrating frozen-screen time! And there's nothing you can do - you can't go to another page, exit the computer, nothing! (I usually scream quietly, then go and make a cup of tea...)
Mixpod doesn't block people from hearing the music, but autoplay still holds the blog up until the widget has stopped loading. Which still slows things down - and people have tried to fix this by putting the widget low down on the sidebar, or at the bottom of the blog (as I recommend for your blog backgrounds). If set to autoplay, this means frantic scrolling to turn the music OFF if you don't want it.
Don't forget - everyone may not have your taste in music, or may (like me) have the computer in the front room... and woe betide me if there's a loud blast of sound when Himself is watching football, or gold, or motor racing, or tennis...
MAKE VISITING YOUR BLOG AN EVEN NICER EXPERIENCEWe all love visitors! We all love to get comments (it's awful to think we're all bloggin away, and nobody is reading our posts) so how can we make our blogs a nicer place to visit?
COMMENT MODERATION & CAPTCHA
We all hate spammers - so many people set their Comments for a Captcha image (which can sometimes be so difficult to read that you're going through three or more before the blog will accept your comment).
On Blogger, go to Settings > Comments and scroll down to Comment Moderation.
Set this to Always and then there is no need for Word Verification (Captcha) as nobody can get a comment past you without you seeing it first!
Don't forget to put your email address in the box below, so non-Google members' comments can still be moderated by you - and also the Comment Moderation box.
So there are two places where you need to put that email address - it doesn't have to be your private email address. You can create an email address with Google, Hotmail or Yahoo and keep it just for your comments! Blogger allows you up to 10 email addresses.
I also notice on some blogs: they have the Word Verification, but don't moderate, so the comment goes straight onto their blog. Word Verification (Captcha) alone doesn't stop spammers! They'll type the image in and still post their rubbish. I do see a few blogs were it says Author has removed comment - so you can see that a comment had to be removed, for whatever reason. Better to stop the comment BEFORE it gets published! ALWAYS tick that Always Moderation box.
COLOUR
If your blog has a dark background, your text needs to be a lighter colour so that people can read it. White can be very hard on the eyes, so go for a pale grey or a cream.
SIZE
Make your text a readable size.
It doesn't have to be huge (you can choose several sizes, eg: small, normal, large etc). If you look in Layouts > Fonts & Colours, you'll see two controls to the right - click Larger until you are happy (you'll see your blog on the split screen underneath).
AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE
Please don't centre your text - it really irritates in a long post. Keep it for headers or quotations. Avoid italics except for emphasis - again, it's hard to read. The worst thing you can do to your readers, especially anyone over 40, is to have centred, italic text in a strobing colour (pink, light green, turquoise, yellow).
PARAGRAPHS
Keep paragraphs short and sweet. Long blocks of text are harder to read, and your eyes tend to skim sections and miss a lot of what you have to say.
ADDING PICTURES
This can be really frustrating! In Blogger, all your pictures load at the top of the post. The best way to postion them is to cut&paste into your post, and this can mean a lot of juggling around (Publish Post, edit, publish again, etc).
For two pictures you want to appear exactly underneath each other, try this bit of code:
<div style="clear: both;"gt;</div>
You'll need to enter it into the html, so click the Edit Html tab at the top of your post box. If you have a bit of text next to your first picture, eg: This is Fred, then enter the code right after the word "Fred". If you only have the picture, you'll see a whole load of code ending in
</a></span> so put it after that. (Any problems, email me!)
I hope this all helps!
I'll add another post as I think of more things. I'm sure this is enough for now, and you're thinking about a nice cup of tea and a medicinal biscuit or three.
Go here to visit Beverly at How Sweet The Sound and to see all the other Pink Saturday posts!
