Goodbye CommentLuv

“…blogging has changed, and the blog itself is no-longer where many people read and interact. Read in the feed and comment on social media. Blogging is still there, but I think comments are slowly dying…

A feed and social profile were luxuries years ago, however now it seems they are part of blogging itself – if you don’t have them do you have a blog at all?”

That is a quote from a comment I left in June this year.

Digital media explorer Ari Herzog has noted how blog comments are evolving, and he now offers his readers the ability to leave a comment via the standard (vanilla) WordPress commenting system, as well as via Facebook and Google Plus.

Blogging is still very much alive, however as my opening quote suggests, the way authors go about publishing content and how readers then go abut digesting and debating this, has changed significantly in recent times.

CommentLuv

Just over two years ago I wrote a post detailing why you should use the CommentLuv plugin. Today very few 0f the reasons I state still hold true.

I have now deactivated CommentLuv on Technology Bloggers for these simple reasons:

Two comments with CommentLuv links

Two great comments with irrelevant CommentLuv links.

  • CommentLuv looks messy – take a look at the two comments to the right. They are both great comments, but they are followed by an untidy, irrelevant link. If someone is interesting in your site, they will check it out anyway.
  • CommentLuv promotes spam – having looked through our comments, very few of our genuine visitors actually take advantage of CommentLuv, yet almost all the spam comments we get include a CommentLuv link.
  • CommentLuv increases load time – you know how obsessed I am with speed, so much so, any plugin which significantly impacts load time is now under scrutiny. CommentLuv is quite a heavy plugin which I have found has a big impact on page load time, and that extra lag isn’t justifiable for what it offers.
  • CommentLuv is bad for SEO – one of the key things Google has been clamping down on of late is irrelevant links. If you run a site about lawnmowers, and you have a large number of links coming from a technology website, it probably doesn’t do you any favours. Similarly, if I have written an article on something tech related, comments with random links introducing irrelevant keywords, dilute the content and probably don’t do my article any favours.
Google SEO chart

CommentLuv is arguable bad for SEO.

CommentLuv was once a great plugin, but its time has passed. The web is changing, blogging more so than ever, so it is time to say goodbye to CommentLuv.

Dealing with emails

Emails.

We all get them – well, I am assuming…

If you are in business or academia, then you probably get a lot; sometimes an overwhelming amount.

It is also not uncommon to have more than one email address, nowadays, many sites actually try to get you to sign up for one – take Google and Facebook for example.

An @ symbol in an envelopeIn order to deal with the vast quantity of electronic mail we receive many of us choose to collate all our emails in one place. Some choose Outlook, some Thunderbird, and others Gmail.

One common theme between [almost] all mailboxes, be it online or a dedicated program, is folders. You can create folders to file your messages. Do you use these folders effectively though?

Is your mailbox a manic mess, or a well organised, tidy space? If you think you would be interested in some simple email tips, read on.

A while back, a well respected blogger (who I follow) named Ari Herzog wrote a post containing his tips to improve your email efficiency. The main points he made were:

  1. Create folders and set filters to move emails into folders – this makes things more manageable and means emails are sorted into orderly folders, so you know where to find things
  2. Keep your inbox empty – this tip I was a little confused by at first, but now I understand Ari’s reasoning, it makes a lot of sense. At the end of each day, make sure all your emails are either filed into their relevant folder, or in a ‘to do’ folder, so you know which messages require your attention
  3. Don’t check your emails every 5 minutes – a valid point, as you can waste a lot of time checking your messages. The way I handle new emails is I have Outlook running in the background all the time, and every 10-15 minutes or so it auto-checks for new mail, it gives me a quick preview, and if it’s urgent, I see to it, if not, I leave it and visit Outlook later
  4. Unsubscribe from junk – this is one of the tips on the top of my list too, if you are signed up to receive updates from companies/websites that you rarely if ever find useful, unsubscribe! Famously, the biggest lie on the internet is the word ‘unsubscribe’ as in many cases it doesn’t work, but companies like Wal-Mart and Shell are obliged to honour the request when you request to no longer receive their mail
  5. Check your spam folder every so often, as things get caught by mistake – I have found this a real issue in the past, so have turned off the spam folder function in my email client, I just delete it as soon as it comes in, and if it persists, I set a filter (rule) to set it to be deleted upon being received

I likes Ari’s tips, which is why I thought I would share them (and my view of them) with you.

The one I was most curious about was point number 2 – keep your inbox empty. I like the idea, but is that really practical? My personal way of dealing with messages there is to keep them unread until I have dealt with them. This does sometimes lead to a massive backlog, which can be left not dealt with for months on end! Higher property emails are always dealt with.

Short But Sweet

Too many emails are a problem, there is no doubt in that. Wouldn’t you love it if all the emails you got were short, concise and to the point?

Too much time is wasted writing unnecessarily long emails, and reading them.

In 2013 I have made a pledge to myself to evaluate long emails before I send them, to see if I can reduce the size. I feel that doing this enables you to express yourself better, and your email is more likely to be read, and sooner – many of us put off reading those long emails until later.

If you want to go a step further, why not make sure that all of your messages are five lines or less? If all your emails were just five sentences, how easy would they be to deal with.

If you are interested in this, there is a handy link you can put in your email footer to let people know about the way you write your emails. Visit 5 sentences or less, which suggests:

“Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.”

Why not give it a go?

Signature

On a final note, think about your signature. Keep it simple. Email signatures take up unnecessary space. If you have just emailed someone, they probably know your email address, so don’t bother including that. Logos make emails much bigger and some email systems block them anyway, so they are a waste of time.

A signature being signedSay who you are and give the person a link to where they can find out more.

My Technology Bloggers signature:

Christopher – Technology Bloggers Admin Team

www.technologybloggers.org

or you can link to a profile like about.me – see below:

Christopher

about.me/ChristopherRoberts

Over to You

So what is your view on emails? Do you use multiple email clients, or try to gather all your messages together into one? How do you deal with your messages, and is it an effective method? If so why, and if not why not?

My 7 Links – An interesting blogging idea

The other day I got an email from one of our commenters, Peter (from Computer How to Guide) in which he said that I had been nominated to continue his ‘7 Links Challenge‘.

After reading Peter’s article, I did a bit of digging and managed to find out what the 7 Link Challenge is, and who started it off.

The 7 Link Challenge (or My 7 Links as it is called by its founder) is where a blogger writes about seven articles they have written, and then nominates other (usually five) bloggers to do the same.

It is an interesting idea with three obvious intentions: firstly to create awareness of ‘posts gone by’ (old posts which have sunk into the archives); secondly to create a flow of PageRank, or ‘link juice’ between a whole host of different blogs, ultimately pushing everyone up the rankings – in theory; and thirdly to drive more traffic to different sites, by bloggers raising awareness of other blogs that they read or contribute for.

The goal of the challenge is

“To unite bloggers (from all sectors) in a joint endeavor to share lessons learned and create a bank of long but not forgotten blog posts that deserve to see the light of day again.”

I think Technology Bloggers could benefit from such a post, and I would like to dig back into the archives and find my seven articles, so I am going to give it a shot!

The seven categories bloggers are suppose to find an article for are: your most beautiful post; your most popular post; your most controversial post; your most helpful post; a post whose success surprised you; a post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved; and the post that you are most proud of. I am only going to do this for my posts, so other authors with sufficient posts can do this too 🙂

My 7 LinksOkay, here goes…

My most ‘beautiful’ post

A bit of an odd name, but I guess this means a post you feel is brilliantly crafted/well written.

The thing is, if I don’t think an article is brilliant, I won’t post it, therefore I love all my posts almost equally. How can I choose my favourite? I don’t think I can, so I am not going to – no one post stands out for me. Check out all my posts in my writer archive to see which ones I like 🙂

My most popular post

This one was an easy one to pick, I just had to see which posts had been read the most, and which had the most comments.

That post was: Is your computer damaging your eyes? The post has had hundreds of views, 37 comments to date, and users spend on average over four minutes on the page, making it the overall most popular post that I have written.

My most controversial post

I hate to sound like I am chickening out again, but I am really not sure what to pick! I try to make sure that most of my posts stir up a bit of a debate, but again, no one really stands out for me. Do you think I have a most controversial post?

My most helpful post

I like to think that all my posts are helpful, either by updating you on the latest tech news, by reviewing a product, or by telling you how to do something.

The post that should be crowned my most helpful post really depends on who you are. If you are a blog owner who wanted to find out how to claim your blog with Technorati then that article was probably the most useful to you, again, if you were interested in new radiotelescopes, The world’s most powerful radio telescope is now functioning! is probably of more use to you. What do you think my most helpful article is?

The post which I was surprised by its success

There are a few posts which I was surprised with, either because they didn’t really get the response I thought they would, or because I was pleasantly surprised by the response.

I have chosen an article which pleasantly surprised me, as I shouted out to the community, and the community responded! That post was: Why would you turn comments off? you can read the follow up post here: Why you would turn off comments.

The post I feel didn’t get the attention it deserved

At the beginning of last month I posted an article entitled Are you doing your bit for the blog? and I really hoped that it would receive similar community attention to what the ‘Why would you turn comments off?’ article did, but it didn’t, and that somewhat disappointed me 🙁

The post that I am most proud of

Looking through all my old posts, this one jumped out at me straight away, as I remember how stunned and please I was when I wrote it. There was no other post that I could be more proud of (yet) than this one.

What was it? This: Look what WE have achieved! after just two weeks the blog was doing so well, and I was just so pleased and proud of my creation 🙂

My nominations

Okay, time for me to challenge some people to find their seven articles. My nominations are:

  • Jonny – One of our fantastic authors
  • James – One of our friends from Windows Talk
  • Ari – Someone whose blog I have been following for many years now
  • Chadrack – A good friend of mine in the blogosphere
  • Lillie – Someone who has provided me with encouragement on many projects
  • You – If you have a blog, I challenge you too!

If you want to find out more about My 7 Links, click the link and it will take you to what I believe to site of the founder of the challenge.