My Blogging Pet Peeves

Last August, I posted SFDB's 9 Priciples of Blogging as a sort of guide to good blogging as I tend to see it. As a follow-up, I wanted to share a short list of blogging pet peeves that bother me when I surf the net and visit some of the 373 feeds I have in my Google Reader.

> Long post titles

Like "The Park Was A Great Place To Be On Sunday." The title is a concise description of the post and not another sentence of it. Personally, I try not to exceed 4 or 5 words when I can.


> "Continue reading" or "read below the fold" annotations on long posts

While I totally understand the reasons for doing it, I clicked once to get to the blog. Do I really want to click again and wait for the page to reload so I can finish the post? Short answer: no. Just keep the whole thing on one page or, better yet, shorten it up.


> Cut & paste of an entire news article

If I wanted to read the whole thing I would follow the hyperlink that you have most graciously provided. Post the good stuff, link me to the rest. Please.


> Vulgar language

Probably just me...but if the only way you can express yourself is by a 4-letter word, I'm not going to waste my time reading the rest of the post because I can almost betcha it isn't worth my time.


> Watermarked pictures

So if you rely on your photography to pay the bills I can understand this, but if you do it just because you don't like people using your photos without asking, then, sorry, I don't see the point in spoiling an otherwise perfectly good image.


> Horrible grammar

Hey, everyone makes mistakes and that's one reason God made spell check. Use it.


> Asking for money "to keep things going"

How much does it cost to host a blog? $100 a year? Maybe $200? Asking your readers to defray the costs of your passion is, in my opinion, about as cheesy a thing a blogger can do [especially if you're driving around town in a Cadi...no names]. If you're hurting that bad, switch to Blogger.


> Sloppy website

Different font sizes, embeds that bleed over into content, broken links...all of these indicate to me that the blogger doesn't care to spend the time to get their formatting correct. I, in turn, don't have the time to read their content.



Can you think of any others?

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