Little, Big Mistakes in your Blog
69It’s very easy for little mistakes to creep up in your blog. Small things that ordinarily, you wouldn’t look near. But a little mistake can have a big effect on how a person sees your site.
Do You Live in the Past?
How many web sites have “© Copyright 2008 Blog Name” in their footer? But does yours still say “© Copyright 2007 Blog Name?”
It’s a simple mistake to make (Why would you be reading your own footer?), but if a reader notices it, they’ll have a nice laugh at your expense.
Even the very best of us make mistakes, isn’t that right TechCrunch and Shoemoney?
Do You Still Recommend Your Blogroll?
A reader generally trusts a blogroll recommendation. When clicking a blogroll link from a blogger I respect, I expect to find a high-quality site on the other end.
Presumably each blog you add to your list is high quality at the time, but not all blogs maintain that quality. Are you still subscribed to their feeds? Has the author been absent of late?
Spring clean your blogroll so that your recommendations continue to be valuable.
Do You Make False Claims?
Here on Pro Blog Design, I remove the NoFollow from my reader comments. Or at least, I thought I did.
Thanks to Marshall, I found out that the Link Love plugin does not work with WordPress 2.3. A lot of people are using this plugin, and most of them won’t have realised either.
Sadly, this honest mistake won’t look so honest to a reader who sees a DoFollow banner on your blog, but finds only nofollows in your code.
For those of you using Link Love, install NoFollow Free instead. It works a charm, and has even more features to play with. Apologies for recommending Link Love in my comment plugins post!
Does Your Blog Still Validate?
If your blog has valid code, it’s common to boast about it in the footer. However, just because a design was valid when you set up your blog, doesn’t mean it still is.
I have xHTML and CSS validation buttons at the bottom of every page here. But at the moment, both of them are invalid on my homepage. This doesn’t bother me because the CSS errors are irrelevant and the HTML ones will disappear off the page in a few posts (And be replaced by new ones no doubt!). It is something that I should look into though, or at least remove my claim…
If you use the buttons, you should check up on them every now and again to make sure things aren’t getting out of hand.
Do Your Readers See What You see?
For most people, there is no reason to ever load up a second browser. Unfortunately, this means that if something goes wrong in another browser (e.g. a plugin malfunctioning), you won’t know about it until someone tells you.
One trick for designers at least (Who load up the other browsers when coding every now and again), is to set your blog as your homepage. That way, you’ll see it often enough.
In the same vein, you should be subscribed to your own RSS feed. Your RSS feed is crucial, and an error there could cost you a lot of subscribers.
Have you made any of these mistakes on your own blog? I know I have. Little mistakes are all too easy to make.
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A suggestion is to use the following code in your footer template to automatically update your copyright details:
<?php echo date('Y'); ?>
What about too many blinking ads?Especially those without display control.Or what about still using the default vulnerable Kubrick theme?
Michael,
thanks for the nofollowfree plugin, if you had not metioned it I would never had known about it.
I think that sometimes we are that busy trying to write and post articles we don’t see or at least overlook these little mistakes.
I need to take a good look at my blog and make some improvements.
So much to do so little time.
Regards
Bryce – I’ve thought about doing that before, but instead, I’ve removed as many tags as possible from my theme. It won’t make much difference, but a little is sometimes enough. :)
Jsanderz – Likewise. It seems there are always things to be improved upon on a blog… :(
I still have 2007 in my footer. I have never noticed it until now.
I can’t believe you’re not pyalnig with me–that was so helpful.
And I just installed the nofollow plugin yesterday…guess I better replace it as soon as I’m back home.I just discovered that I have no copyright notice in my footer, so I don’t have the issue with updating the year. Anyway, I better add it before I get into trouble ;)Otherwise my blog is doing fine, no false claims, no issues on browsers I use for testing… :)
Esvl – I made the same mistake. ;)
Marco – Well I never expected any browsers issues from you! Sorry about the plugin though. Thankfully the rest of them do work…
Until now, I lived in the past, but thanks to you, I’m now in 2008 !
Fabien – As I browse around today, I’m finding more and more blogs from the past. Welcome to 2008!
Hum, I commented, but it doesn’t appear…
I immediately changed the copyright on my blog. The rest are already taken care of.
A client of mine who used to deal in copyright informed me that the copyright statement should contain the year that the company/business/site first started and that was all. Having the year from and to is a common occurence but apparently incorrect. Which is why I state the year my site started and not the current year. Further info on it at http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#fnv Of course you could then argue, does each page on a blog get the year stated when the post was written, or does your footer copyright apply to the site in its entirety. Another option of course (maybe), is to omit the year.
“Even the very best of us make mistakes, isn’t that right TechCrunch and Shoemoney?” LOL. I made the same mistake myself…after reminding everyone to update their footers (see “How Ironic”).
“Do Your Readers See What You see?” In addition to checking in multiple browsers, I recommend checking different screen resolutions as well. I didn’t know Webmaster-Source’s background tile wasn’t centered correctly until I decided to increase my monitor’s resolution. And a lot of my readers use the higher resolution.
P.S. There’s one thing about this WYSIWYG editor that’s driving me crazy: You can’t press Ctrl I, Ctrl B, etc to toggle the text styles. I keep opening Firefox sidebars accidentally.
Great post. I’ll look through my site and see if any of these need looking at. :)
Milo – Blinking ads are the worst. I’m just going to cross my fingers that most bloggers won’t have had those in the first place. :)
Read Scott – Sounds good.
Sarah – Hmm… Interesting point. I’ve always thought that it was the date the article was published to be honest, but I couldn’t tell you where I first read that. It makes more sense to me though:
When you read a magazine, or buy any product, the copyright is always for the year the product was released, isn’t it? Not the company. Articles could be equated to individual products, couldn’t they?
Matt – Haha. At least you caught on afterwards! And haha, we could always bug the developer with feature requests if you want? ;)
Jenny – Hope you find something you’ll like.
I also don’t nofollow, but I tweaked the plugin I use to add in rev=”vote-for”. Then I tweaked my stylesheet so that links I endorse have a smiley face after the link.
I have my home page set as my main web site in all of my browsers. The one problem is I don’t have IE 7, since I’m on a Mac. And IE is the one browser that breaks most often.
How To Sell – I think the range is the best idea as well. I think it is the correct option personally (Check out my reply to Sarah in my previous comment), but she could be right instead of me.
But I think that what is more important than being legally correct there is to look after the image readers will make of your site. The internet is chock full of abandoned sites and out-of-date information. I think that’s part of what makes blogs so attractive (The fact that they publish new content, regularly). If you came to a site for the first time, didn’t know anything about it, and saw 2006 in the footer, would it impress you or put you off? I think it would put you off. :(
Michael – That’s a great little customisation! I’ve done that before for links opening in a new window, but never thought of it for link recommendations. Nice touch.
I posted about code validity fairly recently ( Why are plugins making my code invalid? ). What I found was that even though the theme itself was valid, there were plugins and widgets that I’d installed since deploying it that made it invalid. The embarrasing thing was that I’d been claiming validity all along.And I’m still having problems with certain plugins on my new theme, which is frustrating.
about the copyright…I just visited a page I have to check every now and then. After this post I had a look at their footer and they don’t use a range and they don’t use the year the page was created, instead they are using only the current year.The page I’m talking about is Xfire.com and since it is a big site one would guess that using the current year only is a correct legal way to do it. Same for Microsoft and Google, although Google’s iGoogle is still set to 2007 :evilgrin:Simon, I know that feeling about the invalid plugins. Usually I take the time and digg into the plugin code, applying a patch or two which makes my page valid again. I’ll write a more detailed comment on your site because I saw at least one issue I also had. :)A nifty tool to make sure your website/blog is valid after you made a change is the HTML Validator Extension for Firefox. I have it always enabled, that way I find the errors even before any visitor may encounter them.
Michael,Great point with the validation issue. This is often one vital point that will solve a lot of problems with readers that use different browsers.Usually most validation issues are just a lack of a closing tag or something else simple, but you can also use validation to help you solve the big issues of those annoying design problems that you get stuck on every so often.
Are you sure “nofollow” has been removed?� Maybe I am confused about it’s implementation, but it looks to me like they are in place on this page.
I’m so sorry, Michael, I should have remembered to inform you that the Link Love plugin was faulty. I’ve tried using that plugin, and I realized that it wasn’t functioning like it should have, so I switched to another plugin, called All Passion Link Love. This plugin allows the owner/admin to determine when the “nofollow” tag should be removed, e.g. after “x” comments.
Hey, I just thought of something.
& copy;
That would echo the current year…
Yup – I’m one of those who were living in the past. I have now changed it to read 2008, silly me :D
Thanks for prompting me to change it, would have still said 2007 by 2009 otherwise hehe
Michael, at least the socalled top bloggers are using those annoying blinking ads as a poor example for newbies =( .
Simon – Same problems here. I’ll have a read of your post now and see what you did about it. :)
Marco – But what about sites like Amazon? You could well be right though. That brings us up to 3 possible ways of displaying the year. xD
Elliot – Agreed. The Validators are a fantastic tool when you’re coding a design and the code isn’t working the way it should be. There’s almost always just one little </div> that you’ve left out somewhere…
David – You have to have made 3 comments before the nofollows are removed on your name. That way, the spammers never get any credit here. :D
Pelf – Ahh, I didn’t know that someone had continued on that one’s development. Looks to work in the same way that the NoFollow Free one does. Thanks for sharing. :)
Redwall – Yep. Someone up above mentioned that as well, but I like having as little PHP calls as possible.
David – Haha, I think a lot of us were. :D
milo – I know. Unsurprisingly the “make money blogs,” are often culprits… :(
Not sure if it’s of any interest but for follow/nofollow on comments I use a modified version of dofollow from Greg Boser – http://www.gregboser.com/dofollow-plugin which allows you to turn on dofollow after X days, but it also allows you to turn nofollow on for individual comments. Especially handy when you’re not sure of someone. Of course having it for having to make 3 comments is probably a similar idea. I just like the additional control!As for the copyright, I think it’s what you prefer. Michael, you’re right in that it’s when the publication was first made, so perhaps the best option is to use the year of your post? Would be easy enough to do I’m sure. Of course where does the front page stand. The page was created in 200X but some of the content is new. Or perhaps we’re all reading too much into this! With a blog, worrying about the date in the footer isn’t so much of a issue providing your posts have their publish date on.
Sarah – That way of treating NoFollow looks just as good. If it’s a spam comment, you’ll have deleted before the 3 days are up. :)
As for the date, I agree that it doesn’t really matter. ProBlogger leaves the date off the footer altogether. If his blog can get away with it, I’m sure our little ones can!
Thats funny about Shoemoney and TechCrunch..You’d think with so much traffic that somebody might point that out.I’m not quite sure about “Valid XHTML and CSS”. What is the point of having your design approved by a bot? Is it so that you know that it is compatible with all browsers? Oh well.You have a great thing going here and I look forward to reading more terrific content.
*Edit* Another thing I noticed was that the AJAX editor that you have does not bold or create new paragraphs for me..Is it on my side or yours?
Very easy way to avoid the dates in your footer becoming outdated is just to use <?=date(‘Y’)?> to show the current year, saves a heap of time/embarrassment in the long run.I’m not sure how much I agree about validation, conducting labs with visually and motor impaired users very frequently I’m very much in the camp of “valid doesn’t mean accessible”. Sometimes it’s best not to provide an alt tag for an image if it’s not something that’s beneficial to a screen-reader user, we can’t always encode our ampersands (maybe their part of an external URL) – but these mistakes have no bearing on how usable or accessible your website is so let your common sense define how valid your site is, not a machine.
Brad – Are you using Safari? :(
Garrett – I never said that valid meant accessible (Check out the post I linked to even :) ). I think that they’re more of a vanity badge here than anything else. This is a design site, and it’s gotten to a point where validity is almost expected in design sites (e.g. Can you think of one xHTML/CSS coding service that doesn’t tout “valid code”? It’s a sales pitch for them, more than anything else).
Hey Michael,
Thanks for the shout out and thank you for your suggestions regarding our site!
-Marshall
Welcome. :)
I think I’m alright on most of the above. It might be time to check my blogroll again, though.
Do you have to use a date on the copyright? Mine doesn’t have one – if it did I would have forgotten to change it.
Kristarella, I think you do, but I’m really not certain. I’m even less certain now than I was when I wrote this post! :D
I think that as soon as you publish your work eg. a blog post, unless you state otherwise (eg. creative commons), that information is copyrighted to you regardless of whether you specify a copyright symbol or not. The copyright just contains additional info making it obvious who the copyright holder is, year of publish etc.
Sarah, so long as its on your own site, I think you’re right there.
All right. I just changed my copyright year to 2008. :P
Half a month late Mohsin. I expected better of you! ;)
Question for you. You talk about the copyright date being in the past, but should the copyright date be from when you started your site to the present like you have it at in your footer or just the current year? I guess I could go look it up in Google but thought I would ask.
Lee, I’m not sure to be honest. I think that it’s the date the page was created (Or last edited) on, which is why I use a span of years, to cover all my pages.
But others have said it may only be the current year, or even the year the site began. Check out the other comments for the full debate.
Seems we should all Google it, but no-one has gotten around to it yet. xD
I noticed on Flickr that they seem to have a span of years – presumably either from the year the account was created or the year the photo was uploaded. So some photos are (c) 2007-2008 or (c) 2006-2008 etc.
Also, we should probably all be using Creative Commons rather than copyright. From skimming the Wikipedia article, it seems that Copyright is more of a legal licensing type thing, not something you just assign to your work.
You still made another mistake !Let me point that..You corrected other bloggers to “© Copyright 2008 Blog Name” to live them in present … but I will read that new footer copyright message as “Copyright Copyright 2008 Blog Name” …!!Because , Thats you know why…. © is an International symbol to represent “Copyright ” For example:http://www.apple.com/http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspxhttp://www.techcrunch.com/http://www.smashingmagazine.com/See their footers… You have also done that same mistake…Please assess twice yourself before you are going to correct others.Hope you got what i wanted to say-Ben
Ah, I guess I do live in the past. Sure enough, both of my sites were still sporting the 2007 copyright. :) Thanks for the heads up buddy.BTW: Wow! over 1100 subscribers. Awesome man!
Kristarella – That’s interesting. Well spotted. So it seems it isn’t related to the brand at all then? :)
PixlNinja – When did I ever say I didn’t make mistakes as well Ben? ;)
But I’m not changing it, I like it the way it is. I don’t tend to read symbols in full. They’re just symbols.
© = It’s a copyright statement. It doesn’t actually get read out loud, at least, not by me. How do others treat it? :)
Deron – I wish! FeedBurner has glitched out a bit over the past day or 2. The real number is around 900. (Pity… ;) )
Well nonetheless, 900 is awesome too. Nothing pitiful about that. :) Especially in just over five months or so, right?
Well that’s true. :D (Heck, I’d have been happy with a tenth of that at this point, so long as they all left plenty of comments ;) )
How’s Nice Stylesheet doing?
CSS VALID & HTML VALID ???Your site is invalid!, take off those validation signs!That does not talk very good about you, don’t be a liar, and don’t make laugh about valid code, you have simple issues to solve, so work on them!.Cheerz!, keep trying!…
Cemiotika, there are nicer ways to say something like that.
Maybe he has a few bugs in the html/css code, but except two (I had a short look at it) they are not his fault. Some (ok, many) WordPress plugins insert invalid code and you have almost no chance to fix all of them. He even outlined that there are bugs in the code so stop writing such a stupid comment (sorry for the language)
oh, and btw, if I’d criticize anothers homepage/blog I’d provide a link to my own page to show how it should be done.
Cemiotika,
Read the post please, under the “Does Your Blog Still Validate?” section. I’m aware of the errors here; I just don’t care overly. :)
Marco,
lol, thanks. There are quite a few errors, and I know I should fix them, but when I sit down to work on my blog, I always find there’s something more important that I should look at first. xD
Glad you got in before I did Marco.Why is it that all negative comments don’t have a link back? It can’t possibly be that they don’t all have a website.
Kristarella,
lol, thanks for sticking up for me. :P
He probably has a point though. I guess I’ll add “Fix Validation” to the already-longer-than-I-can-handle to-do list. :D
You should add:Does your Blog Theme load on all browsers and every settings?
This blog is not best viewed at 1024X768 on IE :)
My blog doesn’t either. Just too lazy to fix. Been thinking to have you redesign it :)
Max,
That would be a good addition. Checking in IE6 is the real pain I find. Why Microsoft won’t make a simple to setup IE6 for Vista is beyond me…
And lol; well, I’m always up for a good project. :)
The last one – do readers like what they see? – has always been a lot more important to me than whether the code validates.On a more important note, any thoughts on the legal implications of not having a date ( or even just a year / range of years ) in your copyright notice?
I’ve been talking to a few people about copyright and it seems that there’s no legal implications to not having a little logo or dates.
You already have monopoly (the right of copy) over the expressions of an idea that you have created. Using a (c) simply reminds people of that. (cc) is a method by which you can automatically allow others certain levels of usage of your stuff.
That’s my understanding of it at this point. It might vary in different countries, so apologies if what I’ve said doesn’t apply to you.
I think Kristarella has solved it there. By default, anything you create is copyright to you (e.g. I couldn’t just steal Kristarella’s Gravatar and use it, even though she hasn’t stamped “Copyright” all over it :) )
Adding that line to your footer seems to be a convention, more than a real legal measure (Just like how I still use ”
© Copyright” in mine, even though PixlNinja may well have been right in saying that wasn’t perfectly semantic).
A good list, some of those are easy to ignore.To ensure my site stays valid, I use inursite, which will validate a site daily and provide an RSS feed indicating pass or failure. It’s an excellent little nag to ensure you fix any mistakes.
Andy,
That sounds like a good idea, but I think I’d get sick of the nagging and end up just ignoring it. :(
Can you set it to check weekly just?
I think that if you wrote them in compact points then it would look more better….
I thought the same thing, but I’m not sure how to improve it really. The questions did need (for the most part!) the few lines of explanation each.
Maybe a bulleted list of the questions right at the start?
Some great tips thanks
I am definitely qualify of #1. That is something so easy to forget – I know I did.
And Thanks a lot for putting together such a great site. I think I’ll be spending plenty of time reading my way through many of your posts. Advice/guidance on some sites can be overwhelming. Yours is one of the best I’ve come across. Keep it up! I’m looking to your site as I make my way through my own blog!
Regards,
Manish Kapoor
A good list
These are some great tips. I’m trying to start my own blog and these tips are invaluable.
Great tips thanks
These are some great tips. I’m trying to start my own blog and these tips are invaluable.
A must read for all blog owners. These mistakes are often overlooked. Great post!