There are millions of blogs out there, all posting on a wide variety of topics and subjects; however, there are a few common types of blog posts that I can’t stand.
The “I’m Working on a Post” Post
Don’t waste time telling me of a grand, life changing post you will soon be making. Instead, use that time to actually work on the post. I know some people like to drum up excitement about upcoming posts, but I’d rather have an awesome post a day earlier than a leadin three days before the real thing.
Twitter Collection Posts
I know some twitter plugins for wordpress allow you to automatically collect a set number of your twitter posts and post them, but why even bother? If we follow you on twitter, and take the extra effort to visit your site, why show us the same content we read days before? Wouldn’t it be better to simply kill your blog and push people to your twitter page, where you do all your updates and postings?
Fresh Start Blog Post
So you didn’t post on your blog for three years and two months and you want to get back into the swing of routine posts, good for you. Keeping your website current can be hard work, and falling behind happens, but why waste my time telling me what you hope to do? Why not simply keep your site updated? I’ve got a secret, if you keep your site current, I’ll pick up on the fact that you want to keep your site current. So there’s no need to make a post saying you’re sorry, or about how your car died and you lost your house keys and the computer OS crashed so you couldn’t post for 18 months. Jump right back in, and I’ll forget you ever left.
Promise to Post More Post
If you only post once a quarter, don’t waste one telling me you hope to start posting more frequent updates. If you want to post more, then post more. We readers will get the idea, no need to explain it to us.
New Design Introduction Posts
Don’t waste a post telling me you changed your site’s design and you’re still working out some of the bugs. I feel fairly certain that if you change the design I’ll notice it. And if your site still has display bugs you want to fix, then pull it back into dev and leave the old one up. I don’t want you telling me I can only read your site in Safari on an iPhone until you get around to testing in all browsers. There’s no need to tell me that, I’ll notice the text is backwards and simply leave.
Last.fm Chart Posts
Yet again a wordpress plugin offers to do the work for you and make a post out of information from another site. In this case it’s a weekly summary of your last.fm scrobbles. Who cares if you listened to Coldplay 56 times, and Wall of Voodoo 42 times? I know I don’t, but if I did, I would visit your last.fm profile. That’s not to say I don’t like having a recently played plugin on your site. I find people’s listening habits fascinating, but when you present it to me as content for your site, I move on.
So that’s my post rant. What types of blog posts get under your skin?
Photo Credit: conskeptical
11:53 am
Nice. I am guilty of a couple of those, but you’re right, they are all annoying! I guess the temptation is to write whatever you’re thinking about at the time, and often what you’re thinking about is the design change or the lack of recent posts. This is a good reminder that while those things may be interesting to you, they aren’t necessarily fascinating to anyone else
(Did you know your comment box doesn’t have a scroll bar? When you type too much the text goes off the window and you can’t see it unless you hit the down arrow. At least in Firefox on XP.)