Want Me To Read Your Blog? Do This

http://www.ruli.us/rulius/2011/12/4/want-me-to-read-your-blog-make-a-good-bio-page.html

by dylangs1030 • 15 years ago

22 14 15 years ago

ruli.us

joelrunyon• 15 years ago

It would be interesting to see who the author thinks makes "knockout biographical pages."

dylangs10303• 15 years ago

Well, no, I didn't mean myself :). However, websites like DaringFireball - very good about pages.

user243• 15 years ago

I'll tell you what not to do; dark grey links on a black background. On my laptop screen I literally couldn't see them until I selected all text on the page to see if I was missing something. I was.

edit: Looks like this might be a Firefox only issue. It looks fine in Chrome.

Screenshot (Fx8.0.1, OSX 10.7.2) : http://i.imgur.com/0QNca.png

edit2:

Yup.

body { background: -moz-radial-gradient(center center 45deg, circle closest-side, black 10%, black 20%) repeat fixed 0 0 transparent; }

overrides the background-image and is Mozilla-specific.

Test in multiple browsers, people!

edit3:

Oh for pete's sake, I thought "I know, I'll be nice and tweet him so he knows there's a problem". His contact page doesn't list a twitter, I have to scroll down his sidebar to find a tiny little twitter icon, which has a broken link. I feel really happy taking advice from this guy.

edit4:

anyway, as regards what he's actually saying[A], I don't agree. I run a blog at http://puremango.co.uk which got 80,000 views in the last 30 days (~2500 pageviews per day). Of those, 120 were viewing the about page. It's linked from every page in the top navigation. So, unless I'm doing something wrong I don't think the about page is that important. What's important is quality content.

[A] and you see, this is why getting things like multiple browser testing sorted are important; The discussion has been hijacked by this issue when we could have been talking about your post instead.

amccloud• 15 years ago

Either he fixed it or your monitors contrast is horrible.

user243• 15 years ago

No it's not fixed. I was in bed with the screen tilted slightly away from me. Even face on it's still poor. You can't tell me that #333 text on #000 background is a good idea.

kaybe• 15 years ago

It's the same for me. If I look at it head on I can just see it, but if I tilt my monitor just a little , the links literally vanish, I only see black (and this is 5° max). It's actually bad enough for me to stop poking around the site any further.

gsivil• 15 years ago

The font choice makes the blog such a pain to read.

dylangs10303• 15 years ago

Actually, thank you. This is very weird because when I tested it on Firefox (beta) it didn't display any CSS difficulties. I'll have to go in and change that.

bluesmoon• 15 years ago

I don't know about this. I rarely read the about page, but if someone has a list of blog posts related to the one I'm currently reading, or makes references to other posts with more information, I will often (not always) read those as well. It's very rare that I'll keep going back to a blog or subscribe to its RSS feed. I find that hackernews tends to surface the best stories any way.

As for comments, if I get to a site via hackernews, I'll most likely comment on hackernews.

dylangs10303• 15 years ago

I'm going based on what I see in my traffic, you're right, it could be wrong, but in my experience it seems to be true.

ljfoy• 15 years ago

Spell checking would help too.

PakG12• 15 years ago

That's interesting, because I almost never read the bio. I just see if the content is interesting to me.

Want Me To Read Your Blog? Do This

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