As a web user and blog reader, one is used to the fact that a comment can be left on the post that a given author (blog administrator or guest poster) has written. Most of the time, one comments on the main topic waiting for the author to respond. It usually ends up like this:

1. author writes and posts,
2. commenter reacts and comments the post,
3. author reacts to the commenter’s comment,
4. [optional]commenter reacts to author’s comment,
5. [optional]repeat steps 3 and 4 indefinitely.

What might strike us, is that in the normal configuration, no 3rd or 4th or Xth party is included. Question is, does it have to be like that?

Debate.

The idea of commenting is to create a debate, confront views or improve or complement the original post. Most of the time, only the authors reply to the comments comments posted. Now let’s be honnest, many people ignore other people’s comments. This usually makes comments stale as 3 persons out of 4 will say the same thing.

Why not debate? People seem to be afraid to respond to other people’s comments. It usually looks like people are only interacting with the author and not with the other people around. It ends up being one person yelling alone in a crowd. Just for the intellectual side of it, one can get in and debate a subject with other users.

Drive trafic.

Read all the MMO and “how-to-blog” blogs you can find. All of them will tell you to comment around the clock and the world as comments are gateways for traffic to come from other websites. Not a bad idea but does it really have an impact when your comment is lost in a stream of comments? If there is a “no other comment reading” profile, how will your comment attract attention.

On interacting with another or other commenters, these will certainly be interested in your blog or site. Some qualified traffic for you there. Each interaction with a commenter will be a gateway for the commenter to have a look at your own site or blog.

Along with that, you can visually attract attention especially if the site where you are commenting has threaded comments. The “scrolling reader” will be more inclined in trying to find out what the debate is about when s/he notices the amount of interactive comments being threaded. Now you can attract attention and effectively drive traffic!

Backlinks.

So, you are commenting for the sole reason of creating backlinks. For sure, your “Great Post! Thanks for the inspiration!” comment is not that interesting and you can drop it only once. If you’re interacting with the author, you’ll be dropping one or some more backlinks on the page. Now, why not go for the big job and throw in more backlinks, especially if the post is in your field and your scope?

If the post is destined to hit high PRs, why not maximise the link juice towards your site? One should be careful not to fall into the comment spam trap or turn into a troll. Honest, to the point and on topic comments might prevent this.

And you?

How do you comment on blogs? What drives your commenting? Do you usually reply to other people’s comments? Would you change the way you comment?

WordPress 3.0 is the new current hip. Everybody is switching to the new platform while fearing crashes or great upheavals in the world of blogging. I’ve been a bit worried about all this for some days before taking the leap of the full WordPress 3.0 upgrade. Everything went on really fine until…

Errors through CommentLuv.

I was commenting on a blog I usually visit. When I activated its CommentLuv app, I was greeted with a “No last blog post found” error that got my eyes growing like saucers before starting squinting in pure disbelief, as if staring for 2 minutes at the error message would give me explanation. First thing I did was to check my RSS feed where I found a nice error on line 5 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document error. It dawned to me that the WordPress 3.0 update might have generated this error.

Recurring feed error.

After some research, there seems that this type of error is frequent in WordPress, whatever the version. So I went out to try several feed correcting plugins for WordPress but whatever the solution tried (even that of clearing all WordPress files from blank lines) it didn’t seem to be able to clear the errors out. According to all that I read, it all comes from some trailing blank lines in the feed code. Having tried everything in vain, the only solution to this was to go back to the good old hand coding.

The fix.

Fixing this error was not an easy task but I found an article over at www.w3it.org. The code is fairly simple and its implementation is easy. All in all it takes the feed generated by the WordPress core and clears it all up from any blank line held around.

What you need to do is to open this file:
wp-includes/feed-rss2.php

Open this file in a text editor and look for this line:

header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'), true);
$more = 1;

Just underneath it add this code

$out = ob_get_contents();
$out = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t", " "), "", $input);
ob_end_clean();

That’s all! Short and sweet. This code clears all empty lines and hey presto, your feed is restored.

Other feed files?

You might be asking why the wp-includes/feed-rss2.php file? Just because it is the one that is really used in the WordPress feed. You can however do like I did, I opened all the other feed files and stitched them up with the same code.

The Web Design Bureau of Mauritius seems to have reached a new level in terms of web presence and traffic over the past month. This is why I have decided to make an overview of the most viewed posts each month. What might be somewhat disturbing is that some of the most viewed posts might have not been published over the past month.

Here is your chance to catch up with them if ou missed something. Below are the 5 posts that have caught the most attention over the past month.

You should be (over-) using the H (heading) tags.

A post on how some major standards tags are overlooked and how they would be a sure bet to be included in any web site design.

Speeding your page load time will improve your Google ranking.

Google threw it over the web and everybody started talking about it: page loading time will be a new ranking factor in its algorithm. Find out ways to do it.

Failure of the web design community in Mauritius?

I was a dreamer hoping that there might be a budding web design community in the country but I was wrong. It depends on the people and the way our society works. The 2 commenters here made some great points!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for “coming soon” pages.

This is an exclusive article off the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius. “Coming Soon” pages can do a great deal of SEO work for a website that’s not live yet. Tested and approved tutorial on why and how “Coming Soon” pages are SEOable.

“Facebook login” draws heaps of angry Facebook users!

Is it only usability or understanding the human mind with its different levels of web usage. Find out how the Read Write Web Facebook Login issue tells us some bitter truth on the difficulty of designing websites.

Optimising your site to get Google sitelinks.

Want to get Google sitelinks? Google published a report on the fact that it uses SEO to have its own products listed and ranked in its own search engine. One specific part of the report concentrates on Google Sitelinks and how a site must be set up to get these. Find out how to improve yours to get those great features.

Preparation is the key to success on a blog. Before launching a blog, one has to sit down and think about all the necessary steps to building one’s blog: niche, domain name, strategy, SEO, networking etc. With time and the growing experience on blogging and community building one can now have all the tools for launching a full-fledged successful blog from day one. Pro tips sites are now budding over the web such as Sam’s Web Guide and Icy Tips. One of the topmost tips is to be prepared and, in this field, having a well prepared number of posts even before launching a website is a win win strategy.

After the launch.

I’ve been blogging for nearly 6 years now starting from a daily nonsense life blog on Blogger back in 2004. There was no real direction to that blog and it mixed work and daily life. I must say that life blogging was easy as I chatted away on anything going from my impressions on the way people made extensive use of tramways in Grenoble to my own personal discoveries in the art of Web Designing. Things changed when I started the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius some 2 years ago.

At that time there were lots of pro-blogging websites but I was not prepared as I would have been today. I made the mistake of not planning which explains the difficulties in publishing posts during the first months of this site’s existence. Then, ideas came and I took the pace. But one thing remains difficult to me: taking enough advance on posts to be published. I do spend quality time on the job done here and am a normally well organised person but constant upriver preparation is still not perfect on this blog.

Blogging burnout!

One of the worse things that can happen is blogging burnout. It is not the common “writer’s block”. It is real burnout. This usually happens when one tackles a field that one is unacquainted to or that one doesn’t really master. It can also sprout when too much energy has been put in the launching and preparation of a new blog project and then the whole thing is burnt out because all the subjects or the best subjects have been dealt with. Then, it becomes a real ordeal to manage the whole thing.

Some mistakes I made before.

Getting over excited over the number of posts – When I was a budding blogger, I got really excited over publishing more and more. Each time I had an idea I jumped on my computer and typed my way through my post. I was happy with the job and excited about the ideas I was coming up to. The problem was that, after a while, all the ideas looked bland. Why? Because I was in a certain mood at one time and the posts would have a certain feel and that feel would be here for 5 or 6 posts then change on the following ones. This translated a lack of consistency but, hey, those were the origins of the life blogs where you showed your mood.

Publishing too fast – Publishing too fast was a by-product of my blogging excitement. When you start out writing a lot of posts, you are eager to get a readership and collect the comments on your views. The major problem in that is that you have to refrain yourself from publishing it all. Some days I would be publishing the whole 5-10 posts I would have written in one day. What a waste! It was like eating a whole week’s food on Monday and eating nothing else during the week. Then what? BURNOUT! (short lapse but still…)

This also had the drawback of not giving enough strength to each post. Large traffic websites can go about publishing several posts a day but on smaller sites, this boils down the impact of each post and idea.

Writing long posts – Writing long posts is an art in itself. I happen to be a talkative person and found out you have to master the art of long posts before actually writing them. Readers’ attention-span is short, especially over the web. It doesn’t help to beat around the bush when there’s not reason for it. So keep the posts short until you get enough stamina to run the distance.

I was looking for a chronicle topic to post on but couldn’t really find an interesting one. Then came the thought that my chronicle topics gravitate around storytelling. The logical follow up was to find a story to tell. But then the idea shifted to when I really started writing stories. Well, we should even start at when I started telling stories: I must have been a real good liar when I was a kiddy. People would nowadays put that under the “creative” or “imaginative” tag.

Storytelling in the Mauritian education.

Those of us having tried the “Alliance Française” lectures in Standard 6 onwards are those who have first encountered the storytelling approach of the canvas we had to write. It was the never-ending “A day at the seaside”, “A day at school”, “A rainy day”… and so on topics. You had this and had to write a 1 to 2 page narrative on the subject. This would then become the standard of writing when we got into “collez”. So all of us have to write interesting up to date narratives in English and French throughout our poor student lives. But here crops the different problems. I’ve often heard that Mauritian kids had problems in writing English or French through the lack of training.

Blogs as crutches.

Training and practice is the big problem in this equation. Blogs are now more popular among teens, young adults and adults. Setting aside the fact that writing on a blog is more or less informal, these can act like real crutches to the “collez” students in need of practice. Even if the tone is informal, encouraging teens to open blogs and to write would, in my humble opinion, improve their abilities to write and think out of the box as they will be writing and talking about things that bear particular interest for them: themselves!

Maintaining a blog would break the boredom of writing on uninteresting topics, would incite them to use a more elaborate vocabulary (to get away from boredom also) and give them the incentive of plainly writing. To get visitor attention, most of them would not indulge into plagiarism and the only perspective of losing comments would drive them crazy. Finally, this would be a side activity that would help these young persons make use of the time they spend on the Internet as well as their brains.

Finally, the Mauritian General Paper exams in English at the end of the HSC are mainly oriented towards general knowledge, culture and the scrutinising of up to date information and news. Maintaining a blog might drive the students to remain up to date with the latest information available to be able to blog on the hot topics. This would therefore be a real help to them at this level in the education system.

*”collez” in Mauritius is the Creole world for college, differing from the American description of college. College in Mauritius is junior high and high school all mixed in one.

The Mauritian blogosphere has taken the rise. The eldest bloggers have been active for nearly a decade now. Mauritian blogs are listed on the Mauritius Blog List and Island Website and debates are hot on the past, present and future of blogs, be they on independent hosting or on blogging platforms. Some blogs are visitor baits and others are in niches. Yashvin and Ludovic have been interviewed quite often in the Mauritian press.

And then comes this article on L’Express. Huge publicity for Over Blog, a free French blog platform. The objective (improving the knowledge of blogs in Mauritius) is very commendable but the tone and the choice of words is not really that engaging. Even if the author points out the fact that blogging is not new, the whole tone runs like… “go on people, this is the new craze, open up a blog on Over Blog”. Does that author know that there are hundreds of platforms and that with a WordPress MU platform, any site can become a hoster (e.g: Le Monde)?

Another thing is that the author qualifies the blog as a way to express oneself without having to wait for a comment publication in the press or online. This gives the idea that a blog is like a blank page where you say one thing and go away. This also shows complete oblivion. No information on the way the web works, the communication levers to use to get a blog running and have visitors. The building processes. Say something on your blog but if you do not know how to promote your content and are not ready to fill up the space nearly everyday, it’s no use.

Worse. Let me quote this part:

Si la communauté des internautes apprécient ces opinions directes et sans complaisance, de nombreux journalistes et éditorialistes ont décrié la manière non professionnelle de donner des éléments d’informations pas toujours contre-vérifiés contrairement à la presse traditionnelle*.

As said earlier, having an article on blogs is commendable but the author should have dug a little more in the blogging world and analysed the life and actions of bloggers, especially Mauritian ones, before publishing such a shallow article on blogs.

*If the community of users appreciate these direct and uncompromising opinions, many journalists and columnists have stated the unprofessional manner of providing information not always cross-checked unlike the traditional press.

We are currently in the whole “new year resolution” hype all over the place. People around us, and maybe even you dear reader, are telling everybody around that they/you have made the decision of doing this or that for this new year. All in all, it is a great idea to say all this, the prospect of success, the freshness of it all is like a backfire thrusting you forward in your new resolutions for… 3 weeks!

Problem.

There must be a problem for all those good resolutions to go down the drain. Each year we just list a whole bunch of enthusiastic goals that we drop over some weeks later. As a matter of fact, these are the same things that happen in the blogging world. People start out with an idea for a blog, get excited by the prospect, see how it works or not and drop the whole thing some weeks later. Priscus dealt a lot with the phenomenon on her blog.

What is going wrong?

Just like “new year resolutions” blogging is subject to some #epic #failure reasons that mix, mingle and mess everything.

• Too many things in one go. Too many resolutions = too many parameters, topics or possible roads to follow.
• Too much enthusiam in the beginning with a boost of energy which runs out quickly.
• Sometimes, the blogger forces him/herself in the task. Bad, very bad. This is how you get disgusted with the whole thing. Not enjoyable.
• The vagueness of it all. Resolution: lose 20 pounds. Great but there’s nothing that says how and through what steps.
• Life interferes. In the same way that your everyday life will get in the way of allowing you to focus all the time on your resolutions, it interferes in your blogging pattern, be prepared to it.
• Difficulty. Sometimes one tackles a really difficult resolution and find oneself facing a wall. This is intimidating and the whole thing is dropped

Solutions.

The analogy is quite clear here. So what can be done?

• Tackle one topic and stick to it and only to this one for some time (like: every for a month) before integrating a new one and stick to both and so on.
• Keep the juice flowing. Do not overdo things. 200 word posts are enough to begin with.
• Enjoy doing it. This is the core of the chore. Find a topic that fires your passion, this is the only way of doing it.
• You want to achieve something, draw your roadmap. Plan the job. Determine your publishing regimen. Be consistent in it.
• Don’t let yourself get unbalanced by the various unexpected elements of everyday life. Its not dramatic if you can’t post everyday but you need to get back on your feet and carry on posting. By the way, never post apologies (“sorry for not having posted for so long”), readers hate whingerers.
• Avoid the intimidating element. Start out with easy steps. As one masters one’s field, why not start by the beginning. Some introductory posts are easy to start with.

Welcome to the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius new “Chit Chat” corner where there will be a lot of nonsense or senseless banter. I needed a part of this blog to be more open to diverse subjects that were not really Web Design oriented. This will also let allow me to get some flow out on other interesting things like WordPress and blogging in general.

Talking about blogging, I have always been a fan of the TV series “How I Met Your Mother” and a new (French) blog has been launched for other fans. So be sure to check it ‘coz its gonna be legen… wait for it …and I hope that you’re not lactose intolerant ‘coz the second part is DAIIIIRY…

On another level, and maybe a more intellectual one, I’ve just installed the brand new RSSCloud plugin to this blog. The idea of this plug in is to give real time RSS updates while it needed some time for propagation before. While installing it, I also upgraded a few of my usual plug ins. I never really had a close look at the number of plug ins enabled on my sites but I was baffled to find that my whole system ran on a massive 25 plug ins chart.

Well, it does look massive to me as the more plug ins you add, the slower your site might get. I’m sure I’m not a record holder in those terms. So, how many plug ins do YOU use?