Why You Should Use A Sideblog
A sideblog is a mini-blog that sits in your sidebar. The entries are only ever short snippets, and you can post them on anything you like.
They could be personal updates, like Sil does with Twitter, link recommendations like on Abduzeedo, or even blog updates.
They are very common on personal blogs but not so common on others. I'm considering adding one to Pro Blog Design though, and I can think of a few good reasons for a blog to have a sideblog.
Why Use A Sideblog
- More frequent updates. Whilst some blogs update multiple times a day, most don't. Your blog may only update every 2 or 3 days, which means that there are 2 or 3 days where the only new content from you is in comments. A sideblog breaks up these inactive periods.
- More personal. Sideblogs would work for bloggers who love to be themselves, but still work hard to retain their professionalism in their posts. A sideblog is a good way of showing a little more of yourself (e.g. through recommendations), without compromising the quality of your articles.
- Encourage RSS readers to visit. Some of your most loyal readers may never actually visit your blog. A sideblog (Which is separate from your main feed) would give them a reason to check in every now and then, which may lead to them adding comments, or even ad clicks.
- Posting quick updates. You can probably think of a time when you had a thought/update you'd like to share, but it wasn't substantial enough for a full post (e.g. "A guest post of mine just went up on xyz"). Sideblogs give you a place for those thoughts.
- Spreading the love. Can you empathize with this situation? have many blogging friends now, all of whom write great articles. They rarely relate to my topic though, so I can't link to them from my blog. With a sideblog I could be a little less stick about where I link to, spreading the love.
Why Not To Use a Sideblog
On the flip side of course, there are reasons not to use a sideblog.
- Take up a lot of space. Even though the update are short, they still take a fair amount of room. You'll need a good reason to justify the added clutter.
- Easy to go over the top. It is one thing to start out only posting snippets about your blog, and the odd recommendation. It is a different thing altogether for that to develop into a stereotypical Twitter feed on your professional blog.
- One-way interaction. Unless you use a social service like Twitter or Pownce, there is no way for your readers to reply back to you (Short of sending you an email). This may suit you better in some cases, but it does run counter to the community nature of blogging.
There has been a lot of talk lately about social media profiles, and about tumblelogs. Are sideblogs a good alternative to these?
And for the regular Pro Blog Design readers, should I add a sideblog to Pro Blog Design? I'm leaning towards it now because I want to share more links, and to largely replace the "Weekly Wrapup" sections with shorter, more timely, update snippets.
The downside is that I would most likely remove the Top Commenters widget, to stay uncluttered. Perhaps just linking to a separate tumblelog would be better then?
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About the Author - Michael Martin is the founder of Pro Blog Design. He works as a freelance web designer, loves WordPress, and has an unhealthy addiction to smilies. Written on 31st October 2007.
Other posts tagged with Interaction, Readers, Sidebar, Sideblog.
4th November, 12:35 am GMT
Brilliant! Why didn't I think of that? Normally I'm a PHP-Freak. I'll have to add that soon.
4th November, 12:45 am GMT
lol - Sometimes the simple solutions are the ones we just don't think of.
4th November, 5:47 am GMT
I think it's a good idea, provided you use it conservatively. Some people go crazy with links that are only mildly amusing or interesting - that would turn me off quickly.
In terms of implementations being discussed the separate category excluded from the main feed sounds like the best. I agree that it doesn't need a plugin - sure if you're not comfortable with coding a plugin would be better, but if it's not necessary I'd steer clear. One of the reasons being that you're dependent on that person maintaining the plugin with future versions etc.
I don't understand the aversion to tumblelogs. I think they would be ideal for this sort of thing - you could use the RSS feed from your tumblelog, which other can subscribe to as well, or there's also a script that you can use. It's separate from your main posts, it's really easy to add to (using a bookmark to add something directly from the page you're on - if you're using Tumblr, not sure about others). Sure, you can't have much interaction, but do you really want to for something like this. What kind of comments are you going to get? "Great link", "Thanks for sharing", "LOL, that was great.", "Yay! I've been waiting for this." Sometimes those comments are appreciated, but too many of them is very tiresome and generally pointless.
Or if you really want interaction, use the RSS feed from a site that you already use - SU, Twitter etc. You've already established a presence there, by having a main blog feed, a Sideblog, an SU account, a Twitter account and whatever else you might be spreading yourself or your readers too thin.
If using a category: why do you want to "nofollow"? Are the links good enough to share, but not good enough to give Google cred to?
Also, I thought your own page rank was determined by incoming links. So having a page of outgoing links is not going to affect your rank.
If they think that you're selling links, point out to them that you're not and they'll fix it (a la Copyblogger).
4th November, 5:47 am GMT
Sorry that comment was so long! Woops
4th November, 2:57 pm GMT
Kristarella,
Google hates pages with "little original content." Basically the post pages of the sideblog entries have a couple of sentences of content...and the rest is the single.php template. Here's an example. 95% of the sideblog pages are template.
4th November, 5:34 pm GMT
Hehe. I found a solution. I was able to transition to my new system pretty much seamlessly, and we'll see how it works out.
I outsourced my sideblog to Tumblr.com, and then I pull it's RSS feed over to my blog via the SimplePie RSS parser. It looks just like it did before the switch, and now I don't have to worry about all the puny posts.
For more: http://www.webmaster-source.co.....-sideblog/
4th November, 11:16 pm GMT
How would they know what part of your page is original content? Do they compare all the pages of your website or something?
4th November, 11:51 pm GMT
Kristarella - lol - No apologies for good comments! :p
I don't like an off-site Tumblelog because it's too much hassle to check often as a reader.
As for setting one up and importing its feed onto your sidebar (Like Redwall has now done), I don't like the limited control over the formatting, e.g. The post title links back to Tumblr. With WordPress you could have your post titles as the links, or not use titles at all.
As for the nofollow+nofollow, that would only be on the individual post pages for each aside (You'd basically be telling Google to ignore those pages altogether). The actual links in your sidebar wouldn't be nofollow-ed though. They'd still be regular links, and work as such.
Redwall - Good post.
5th November, 12:08 am GMT
Haha, ok! I didn't apologise for my long comment on the premium theme post.
Good call. I wouldn't really be interested in checking someone's Tumblr unless I was seeking more insight into them or if I was subscribed to it. Technically it's only a click away, like any other page on your blog.
Yes, the headings linking back to Tumblr seems a bit pointless actually, unless there's more of the post that's not shown in the sibeblog. If there wasn't more I'd be tempted to just remove the links from headings if possible.
Oh, good - that sounds like a good idea (re: the no follow stuff).
5th November, 12:37 am GMT
Yep, it's only a click away, but one click is a lot. And when the only incentive to make the click are a few words to the effect of "My links," not many people will do it.
Still, Tumblr blogs do look very nice, and importing them to your sidebar like you said would be no worse than using Twitter.
5th November, 12:49 am GMT
True, true.
Heh, I've never really paid attention to Twitter before, but the name seems to give an accurate impression... like I'm so glad to know that Alex King went to pick someone up at the airport?!
5th November, 4:20 am GMT
Ugh...Twitter. Speak not it's name!
"How would they know what part of your page is original content? Do they compare all the pages of your website or something?" You bet, and along with the rest of the web. Google avoids putting anything in it's index if it seems to be the same as another page.
About the linked headings, I'm not entirely done with my styling yet. I'm still tweaking it slightly.
I, personally, think that it's good to keep the sideblog separate. I just don't think it's entirely a good idea to use Wordpress for the asides. In addition to the search engine thing (which is solvable with the php/meta tag trick), I just don't like the idea of having all those post pages for the sideblog entries. If I could have a separate template and permalink structure (like /sideblog/2007/...) for the sideblog post pages, I'd go right ahead. But otherwise, I just don't want it in there. Also, I probably don't want the sideblog entries mixed-in with normal posts in the archives either. I just think they're better-off separated (though I'd prefer to just have a plugin so I could just use Wordpress, sans the annoyances of the sideblog posts). Yeah, I'm weird.
5th November, 10:49 am GMT
Well I've went for it but plan to do it slightly differently because it's more of a challenge
I've installed a new WP install and blocked the bots (so hopefully that should solve some google issues), now I just need to code something so the last few posts show on my main blog (just, haha), which I think I'll have under my first post only on the home page and maybe some where on the posts page too. I'll let you know once it's fully functional
Thanks gain for the idea
5th November, 11:15 am GMT
Look forward to seeing what you come up with Bob!
5th November, 1:20 pm GMT
Well that wasn't to bad. I know have my last 5 tumbles showing under my latest post on my home page
Of course I only have two at the moment and one of them is Home World, but it the thought that counts
5th November, 2:19 pm GMT
Kristarella - lol - I've never used it much either (For the same obvious reasons... xD )
Redwall - That would be possible (Use category slugs to change the URLs for that category, and category-specific templates for posts in that cat).
Bob! - That was an interesting place to put it. Looks good.
5th November, 5:28 pm GMT
I changed my asides again. *rolls eyes* I couldn't deal with the lag-time between posting to Tumblr and SimplePie's cache expiring.
I'm using Wordpress again, but with some changes.
We're dealing with a new form of blogging, so I guess it makes sense to do all this experimenting.
I'm using the "Sideblog Wordpress Plugin" but I've made some changes.
1. I'm using if(!in_category()) to customize the single.php template for the Asides category.
2. I'm using a filter in functions.php to remove the asides from archives pages. It's working well for me now. Go ahead and look around on WSC if yo want to see what I've done.
Bob! - Nice work. Much better than Matt Mullenweg's asides (which are totally out-of-hand).
5th November, 6:34 pm GMT
Redwall - Cool. Looks like the sort of WP-implementation we've been talking about. Good to see.
5th November, 11:28 pm GMT
redwall_hp - I do like how it comes out using that method. Bit nicer than the Tumblr way actually (the link headings were not so easy to look at).
6th November, 2:11 pm GMT
Glad you like it (and I'm glad I finally like it
).
So, Michael, have you decided yet whether you're going to add a sideblog? And how you'd implement it?
6th November, 7:23 pm GMT
Redwall - lol - Sort of!
I know that I'm going to add one, and I'm pretty certain that I'll be using WordPress. The problem is just finding the time to do it (And add in the updates. Quite a few good things have happened this week, which I'd like to mention! xD )
7th November, 3:58 pm GMT
I think I know where you're going to put it.
The rightmost sidebar, below the most popular posts...right?
8th November, 8:47 pm GMT
lol - Yep, that's why the Top Commenters is gone. It's almost ready. Just want to sort out commenting and RSS still.
9th November, 4:04 am GMT
Nice, it looks good. How did you link the titles like that? What plugin are you using (or is it just a manual-made Loop?)?
1st December, 12:06 am GMT
I know I'm late to this discussion, but I use two different sideblogs (Sideblog and Miniposts). Both server their purposes very well, and are highly configurable. Although miniposts hasn't been updated to work with WP2.3.1, I'm using it on that platform with no issues whatsoever. Between Sideblog and miniposts, it's given me a little place for updates and corrections, and mini news posts. And they can be added to or excluded from feeds. It beats things like Twitter IMNSHO.
19th January, 7:25 am GMT
Interesting idea. In some ways this mirrors a newspaper better and it creates different levels for communication and engagement. Very cool.
9th August, 10:59 pm GMT
Thats a great idea, I have it and my clients love it. Everytime I come to this site they have some great ideas. Thanks
10th February, 3:51 pm GMT
hey all, am trying to make sideblog work but can't manage, i have no options available or to select in the admin part. Could it be due to my WP version 2.3.2 ? (yeah i also posted on webmastersource). Thanks in advance.