Comments on: Who doesn’t want to improve their blog? The Blog Improvement Zone Meme.

By: Where Should the Blogrush Widget Go? What John Reese could do to help us. : Big Bucks Blogger

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:11:25 +0000

[...] because it often loads s__l__o__w__l__y and causes my sidebars to hang. ( I complained about this here. You’ll find Steve Cronin also moved the widget to the footer because it often loads [...]

By: Lucia

Lucia — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:51:48 +0000

@dog tags– that’s just what I mean. Outbound links have many functions. One is engaging other bloggers in conversations which happens to also bring in links.

By: personalized dog tags

personalized dog tags — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:35:30 +0000

also ive notice that google doesnt show all your backlinks thru link:htt://www.site.com. its hard to get backlinks especially if your site is new and as you’ve mentioned if you dont participate w/ other blogs, you wont get any link juice.

By: Lucia

Lucia — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:56:21 +0000

@dog tags: what you say is partly true. Google doesn’t like link farms, humongonourmouse blog rolls or other things. But they often rank pages with loads of related quality outbound links very highly.

Their algorithm is fairly complex, but mostly, you want inbound links. As a blogger, you will get more inbound links if you read other blogs, and have blog conversations with other bloggers. The reason why is they will link back in the natural course of conversation.

By: personalized dog tags

personalized dog tags — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:45:54 +0000

“Not enough posts linking out.”

Google doesnt like if you have too many outbound links.

By: Maurice (TheCaymanHost)

Maurice (TheCaymanHost) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 15:24:45 +0000

Oh, yes, and limping over the line in a very distant last place, just ahead of “everyone” and “I don’t know” comes a rather embarrassed island slacker……yes, I only just realized I’d been tagged by Lucia as well as Vlad.

Humble apologies and belated thanks for the tag Lucia, which, I shall hurriedly include in my own post as soon as I’m done here.

I don’t find your site particularly slow loading but even if I did, I’m too much of a tech dumb**s to be able to suggest an improvement – it’s lucky we have guys like Dane

As for archives, on the blog, my theme provided a link at the top of my page leading to an archive by month. I doubt it’s much use and I think the drop down category menu in the sidebar is a lot more useful. Overall, I find your blog nice and easy to navigate The theme is instantly recognizable as ‘yours’, and if I were to suggest any changes it would be to have a spring clean of the footer – the spam stuff at the bottom could go without losing anything from a reader perspective. I think if Dean’s advice works, your Bumpzee and BlogRush stuff would do you far more good in one of your sidebars, even well below the fold. (I’ll add my usual qualifier – what the heck do I know though!)

Thanks for mentioning the four column layout on my directory. I chose it because the site is not realy a “regular blog” and it was an attempt to use WP more as a CMS and WPDesigner’s theme seemed ideal for what I had in mind. Still needs a lot of work.

Thanks again for the tag…..I got there in the end!

Maurice

By: Dane Morgan

Dane Morgan — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 01:32:41 +0000

That’s exactly what I was getting at Lucia. It’s the containers. If you have the entire sidebar, top to bottom in a single list some browsers will load the entire container (list) before displaying it. By breaking it up into several separate lists (or divs) each will render before the next processes.

This is why the upper “about me” on the knitting blog loads without waiting. It isn’t in the same container as the rest of the sidebar.

By: Lucia

Lucia — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:06:45 +0000

@Dane,
I think I don’t understand some nuance, because I did put the slower stuff to the bottom.

There is something about the way the CSS is in my sidebar that keeps the whole sidebar from loading while it waits for the slow stuff to appear.

I’m sure I could somehow fix this with CSS, but I’m not sure how. (My CSS skills are poor.)

My knitting blog is better. On that blog, I load a wide “about me” box at the top of the sidebar that load quickly. Then, I load the lower sidebar, and if it’s slow, I don’t care. I’m thinking of fiddling with stuff along those lines.

By: Caroline Middlebrook

Caroline Middlebrook — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:11:48 +0000

I am one of those people who likes temporal archives. Sometimes I come across a blog that I like so much that I want to read it all from the beginning – this is especially the case when the blog is following some kind of story or journey.

A plugin that I have used on my blog that might help you with this is called “smart archives”, here’s the link:
http://justinblanton.com/2005/03/smart-archives-v101

By: Josh Spaulding

Josh Spaulding — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 03:13:55 +0000

Hey Lucia,

As far as products to promote, just let me know when you have everything set up how you like and I’ll give you some great recommendations.

This is actually the first meme I’ve taken part in. I do know Maurice and I were tagged by Vlad and we’ve already posted ours lol I will however reciprocate the link love.

I can see memes being a little complicated when it comes to who tagged who, but they seem like very good link bait and a good way to learn a thing or two as well.