Please don't...

I must have some nerve passing out advice about blogging considering the hap-hazard, slipshod way in which this site evolved into the unwieldy mess you see before you. 

Looking back, I seem to have made pretty much every mistake possible... and would probably do most things differently if I ever had the chance to take a ride in Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine.  But I don't have that chance... so I have just a couple of words of advice for all the new and would-be bloggers out there. 

[Note: This isn't about content, publicity, linking or the frequency at which you post.  I think I managed to beat those horses quite thoroughly to death over here.  No, the scope of today's advice will be limited to titles, taglines and templates.  Also, if you are a blogger and are doing everything that I advise against here, and still getting stellar results... good for you!]

OK, here we go...

First and foremost, try to select a somewhat original title for your blog.  I'm going to start by picking on my good friend Jack for the title he selected:

'Random Thoughts' 

Now, how many blogs do you think there are out there with that very same title?  Trust me when I tell you that it is only Jack's fine writing and prolific output that keep his nose above the flood-waters of the other gazillion sites with the same title (or some variation thereof). 

Next, humor is good... especially the self-deprecating kind... in a blog's title and/or tag line, but certainly isn't required.  But when picking a title and/or tagline, please do try to make sure that one or both are at least somewhat memorable.  For example, avoid words like 'musings', 'ramblings' and 'rantings' unless, like Jack, you are willing to invest Herculean effort into pulling yourself up out of the quicksand of other blogs who have chosen those same words to describe whatever it is they think they are doing.

Oh, I just thought of one more word to avoid; 'ruminations'.  This may be just a silly prejudice of mine, but every single time I see a blog title or tag line that contains the word 'ruminations', I picture the author standing in the middle of a meadow staring at me with vacant bovine eyes and chewing his/her cud.  Yes, 'ruminations' and 'ruminant' are linguistically related... and if I can't get past your banner without visualizing you midway through the messy half of a two-stage digestion process... I'm probably not going to visit your site very often.

Next, get thee out from under the tyrannical thumb of the standard template.  Even if you only change the color scheme or add a picture or graphic to the 'about me' corner of your page... make the effort to distinguish yourself just a little bit from the billions and billions of other stars twinkling in the blogosphere sky.

One of the reasons I don't avail myself of the convenient blogreaders and feeds is that I have a terrible memory.  I need the visual reference of seeing a blog's color scheme and graphics to remind myself who it is I'm reading.  Trust me, if Shakespeare had used the standard blogger template and color scheme to publish his oeuvre, he would have died in obscurity.

In fact, I can honestly say that the point at which treppenwitz turned a corner in terms of traffic and regular visitors was after I added the nifty custom banner you see up there at the top of the page (thanks honey!).  Of course, if the content sucks, no amount of lipstick is going to make the pig look more attractive. 

And last but not least (for now), look at your site using different browsers to make sure it loads and displays properly in most, if not all, of the tools your readers might be using.   If you encounter a problem with a particular browser, you may have to make a decision based on how many people are using that browser.

For instance, I know that treppenwitz loads well in most browsers but is a disaster on WEB TV.  A little tinkering around made the WEB TV users happy but made my site unreadable for everyone using Firefox,Opera, Safari and IE.  So since there were less than three people left in the world using WEB TV to surf the Net (two of whom were treppenwitz readers), it didn't make sense to mess up the way the site would load in the popular browsers. 

If you want to do a quick and easy check of other browsers, go here and type in your blog's URL.  It will give you a snapshot of the front page as it loads in most of the browsers out there.  Be patient... it can take up to 30 minutes to get your results so bookmark the page and come back to check.

Anyhoo, that's about enough damage for one day.  As always, don't thank me... I'm a giver.