What is UX? Basically, it’s a contraction of User eXperience - and it takes in interaction/interface design and usability. More than that, it is about the total user experience - how we use computers (and other tools) to complete tasks, whatever those tasks are.

I’ve been in UX and IA (Information Architecture) for a long time now - well over a decade if you count my first brush with it in a professional situation. It is one of my passions, and this conference gives me an excuse to work with some very talented people (my partner Donna Spencer, and our friends Steve and Danielle Baty) and do some cool stuff.

What does this have to do with bloggers and blogging? In its purest sense, blogging is about communication. I have something to say, so I write it, and if you think that you might like it, you read it. For effective communication to take place, two things need to happen: you need to find the stuff you need, and you need to be able to utilise it - find the stuff, use the stuff. Without this, effective communication cannot take place. Appropriate user experience techniques can help you to:

• choose (and design) templates that support effective information seeking task completion (i.e. help people find the stuff) and presentation (help the template not get in the way of real people actually reading the post)
• evaluate blog platforms for things that get in the way of the most basic “find the stuff, use the stuff” tasks
• give a good practical illustration of some fundamental principles of cognitive psychology - how people make decisions and why your concept of “it works for me” may not be universal

Make no mistake, UXAustralia is not a conference specifically for bloggers - it is more that professional/business bloggers can benefit in a direct way from understanding UX principles and techniques, and every blogger can benefit from knowing a bit more about how people find and use information.

So… onwards and upwards to August 2009 in Canberra

Inspiration - it is very hard to fake, and without it your blogging days are over. It’s that simple You can fake sincerity with some of the people some of the time, maybe even all of the people for a while - but maintaining a wall of bullshit gets old very quickly…. it is tiring, believe me, I have tried My one piece of advice around inspiration is to examine your motivation for blogging so that you can understand how to take it further if you want to.

When I started blogging seriously I was inspired by the prospect of becoming the next Darren Rowse. Of course, what I didn’t realise at the time was that Darren was quite happy being Darren, and wasn’t ready to stop being himself any time soon. In other words, the position wasn’t really vacant. So then I had to look at different motivators.

Motivators vary amongst bloggers. There is a lot of suggestion that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is outdated - well, for most of us in modern Western societies who have the luxury of not living in fear of our lives or wondering where our next meal will come from. Regardless, Maslow’s model does drive home the point that different people are motivated by different things. I’d like to propose the following list of motivators for bloggers - based entirely on discussions I’ve had with others over the last couple of years (not very scientific, but then again, I have never pretended to be a scientist).

1. Financial gain: not as common as you might think, but one of the biggies nevertheless. For some (such as stay-at-homers who have no other source of income) it can be a powerful source of inspiration.
2. Respect from peers: many “professional” bloggers (not the probloggers per se, but the people that blog within their professional niche) seek to gain respect from others in their chosen field.
3. Promoting a cause: pick a cause - from the plight of wild horses in Australia’s national parks and global warming to breast cancer and the war on poverty - and you will find a plethora of bloggers supporting it. There are often bloggers at both ends of a given cause spectrum - the war over abortion (right-to-life vs. right-to-choice) is a classic example.
4. Networking: the need to reach out and touch, and be touched, by others is a basic human motivation. We want to find other people like us and to communicate with them, and build communities in which to share our respective hopes and dreams.
5. Self-realisation: you don’t see this very often, or at least I don’t - the need to become a better human being. I’ve seen some cause-bloggers become better as a result of their blogging - they rise to a position of leadership within their community and are the better for it. It is worth saying that this is not always the case - leadership inspires some to sainthood, and others to stupidity and spite.

There are no doubt a thousand other potential categories for blogging motivators - these are just one way of looking at them.

Is it enough to categorise ourselves and others as one or more of the above? No… but I think that understanding the source of your own inspiration to blog is important. Whatever you are, it is important to understand what you are if you want to be a better one. If you are blogging out of a need to be appreciated by peers, write and present your material in a way that makes this easier - write professionally, with an eye always on the main prize (being taken seriously). Similarly, if you are a cause blogger, write sincerely about that cause, and not about what you had for breakfast or the bastard that cut you off in traffic yesterday.

What inspires you? Why do you metaphorically get out of bloggy bed in the morning and set forth to post?

I’ve been a fan of self-hosting for a long time. Get a real blog platform, get a domain name, get a hosting setup, brand yourself, and build the brand (as an aside, I am now the number one Andrew Boyd on Google after the books.google.com entry, thanks for your support, folks ).

Now that I’ve mellowed, and blogging is no longer a life-or-death struggle for Greatness, how do I feel? Would I still give the same advice?

Yes, I think I would.

There is nothing wrong with Blogger, wordpress.com or TypePad blogs that you get for free - until you want to do something serious with them.

Here’s what I wrote in the Get A Real Blog e-book back in January 2008:

For some people, the free blogs aren’t enough. Some of the reasons for looking at an alternative to free blogging are:

• Flexibility and extensibility - if you need total control over look and feel (blog theme, individual page templates, and overall layout), you may need to explore the freedom that a self-hosted blog offers,
• Making money - there is a certain amount that you can do in placing Google ads into a Blogspot blog, but if you want to pursue other money-making ideas (like third-party ad brokers) then you will need a better setup, and
• Notoriety - while not easily separable from making money, having a higher index ranking (such as Google PageRank or Technorati rank) relies heavily on brand reinforcement (in other words, the effort you put into promoting your blog name and associated domain name).

These reasons haven’t changed - if you want to have more control over your blogging environment for whatever reason, then self-hosted on your own domain name is still the way to go.

It doesn’t have to cost the earth - if you can afford an extra ten dollars a month for hosting and ten dollars a year for a domain name, then you’re in. For the polybloggers, there are hosting accounts for thirty dollars a month that allow you to host a hundred low-traffic blogs (and scarily enough, some people do have a hundred blogs). I discussed some hosting options in Get a real blog: Finding a hosting provider and transferring your domain name (and it is worth reading this post if you are interested).

What’s your hosting experience? How have you found your current setup? Is it something that you would recommend to others? If you get a finder’s fee for referrals, would you still recommend your current hosting provider to others even if the referral fee wasn’t there?

Dear friend, relative, former lover, current or former colleague, person I got drunk with at a conference, or combination thereof,

you are receiving this email because I am taking part in Movember this year to raise awareness and cash (OK, it is mainly about the cash) for men’s health issues - prostate cancer and depression. I think “issues” is too polite a term, these are vicious nasty things that kill people - men and women alike (granted, statistically, more likely to kill men). Regardless, they suck, and I want to ask for your help in doing something about it by donating money to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Beyond Blue. Having lost friends and relatives to both prostate cancer and depression, this is kind of a personal thing for me.

To kick this off, this morning I shaved my moustache off - please see the attached picture… it is not a pretty sight

Anyhow, back to the money thing. I will not think less of you in any way, shape or form if you do not feel moved to donate or if things are tight for you at the moment. I understand that these are scary times for a lot of people.

If you do feel moved to donate, please follow the link to https://www.movember.com/au/donate/donate-details.php?rego=1547766&country=au

or

go to the main http://www.movember.com website and search for these details:
Name: Andrew Boyd
Registration number: 1547766
Country: Australia

The reason that I am asking you to donate in my name is that I will be matching your donations, dollar for dollar, because it is something that I believe in.

Thanks, Andrew

And just so that you don’t miss out, here is the photo. I have to warn you, it is a bit gruesome!

UPDATE: You can also follow my Movember mo-blog.

Anyone that donates gets this nifty badge:

And it is not just about the boys - as well as mo’bros, there are mo’sistas as well. My thanks once again to the wonderful women and men who have donated so far

]]> http://onblogging.com.au/2008/11/01/pity-the-mo-less-andrew-does-movember/feed/ http://onblogging.com.au/2008/11/01/pity-the-mo-less-andrew-does-movember/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OnBloggingAustralia/~3/_0BQBOjtUSA/ http://onblogging.com.au/2008/10/01/entrecard-biting-the-hand-that-feeds/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:00:00 +0000 AndrewBoyd http://onblogging.com.au/?p=254 My relationship with Entrecard has come to an end.

After encouraging dozens of other people to join, blogging about them repeatedly, and maintaining the Aussie Bloggers on Entrecard list since January this year, I received an email from them this morning to say that my account had been deleted - one of the three blogs I had displaying Entrecard links doesn’t meet their quality standards.  I emailed them and asked why - and got the following unsigned reply:

As the email states rule 3, http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=blog_quality_standards

The rules are, Minimum 5 posts: Blogs with no posts, or less than 5 posts, will be removed. Also rule 12 Content must be recent: Sites that have not been updated in six months will be removed.

This blog had less than 5 posts, all of which were well over 8 months old.

I replied:

Dear anonymous support person,

As my email states, this is a bit insulting after a lot of promotion on my part ( above and beyond any personal gain I may have had as a result) encouraging people to use Entrecard.

Time will tell if things change with my departure and followon reporting. I wish you the best of luck in the future.

Best regards, Andrew

They are a private organisation, have their own rules and standards, and I opted to join them, fine. My bad, I trusted them to keep up their end of the bargain. I’m not going to get emotional and list some of the scraper and one-post blogspot blogs that are still on Entrecard - I can’t get that excited about it.

I’ve written before about the responsibility that social computing platforms of all types have to their users - the implied social contract should (and mostly does) go beyond the petty legalese. A lot of the people that felt shabbily treated by WordPress felt that way because of the abuse by one of the WP forum moderators. Basically, I think that a lot of people will no longer deal with the rude - and “like it or lump it” support is rude, rules or no rules.

I’m not going to encourage you to leave Entrecard or to stay with them - I think I’ve probably wasted enough energy on them over the last 10 months I’ve been a member and unofficial evangelist.

I’ve deleted the Aussie Bloggers on Entrecard list - should someone else want to take it on, here is the list effective 1 October 2008 (sans my blogs):

• Abundance Highway (blog) and Entrecard page
• Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe (blog) and Entrecard page
• A.K.A Mum (blog) and Entrecard page
• All For Women (blog) and Entrecard page
• Amys Digi World (blog) and Entrecard page
• Angel Psychic Blessings (blog) and Entrecard page
• A Roaming Aussie Mum (blog) and Entrecard page
• Ask Josie Kay (blog) and Entrecard page
• Aussie Bloggers (blog) and Entrecard page
• Beauty Banquet (blog) and Entrecard page
• Ben Barden dot com (blog) and Entrecard page
• Blogging Personal (blog) and Entrecard page
• Blogging Sueblimely (blog) and Entrecard page
• Canny Granny (blog) and Entrecard page
• Cherry Blossom Adventures (blog) and Entrecard page
• crazy meezer (blog) and Entrecard page
• Dancing About Architecture (blog) and Entrecard page
• Debt Diet (blog) and Entrecard page
• DigitalBurn (blog) and Entrecard page
• Dipping into the Australian Blogpond (blog) and Entrecard page
• Discovering Australia (blog) and Entrecard page
• Down Under (blog) and Entrecard page
• Duncan’s TV Ad Land (blog) and Entrecard page
• Hobart Daily (blog) and Entrecard page
• Insight of Nothingness (blog) and Entrecard page
• JDonuts (blog) and Entrecard page
• Josh Sharp Design (blog) and Entrecard page
• Just 4 Families (blog) and Entrecard page
• Jylanization (blog) and Entrecard page
• Kin’s Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams (blog) and Entrecard page
• Kin’s Money (blog) and Entrecard page
• laketrees (blog) and Entrecard page
• Leopard Tricks (blog) and Entrecard page
• Light Sweet Crude (blog) and Entrecard page
• Lightening’s Blogworld (blog) and Entrecard page
• Lightening Online (blog) and Entrecard page
• Liz Harper Fitness (blog) and Entrecard page
• Magneto Bold Too (blog) and Entrecard page
• Manamee (blog) and Entrecard page
• mummifiedtimesfive.net (blog) and Entrecard page
• My Big World Of Crap (blog) and Entrecard page
• My Radical Blogs (blog) and Entrecard page
• NotJustMama (blog) and Entrecard page
• Our Great Southern Land (blog) and Entrecard page
• Picklebums (blog) and Entrecard page
• Pixelated Thoughts (blog) and Entrecard page
• ProBlogger (blog) and Entrecard page
• Scarlet Words (blog) and Entrecard page
• School Spirit (blog) and Entrecard page
• Schwoit (blog) and Entrecard page
• Secluded Habitat (blog) and Entrecard page
• Socko’s Spot (blog) and Entrecard page
• Snoskred - Life In The Country (blog) and Entrecard page
• Stuff from Emma, Brad and Phil (blog) and Entrecard page
• SultanaBlog (blog) and Entrecard page
• Swollen Pickles (blog) and Entrecard page
• Tasmania’s Journal of Discovery (blog) and Entrecard page
• Telling It Like It Is (blog) and Entrecard page
• Tim Christie Freelance Photographer (blog) and Entrecard page
• The Anatomy of Construction (blog) and Entrecard page
• The Nook of Oz (blog) and Entrecard page
• The Original Mx5 (blog) and Entrecard page
• The Tall Poppy (blog) and Entrecard page
• Wish Washy (blog) and Entrecard page
• Welcome To A New Day! (blog) and Entrecard page
• Life Power Tips (blog) and Entrecard page
• Life Success Snippets (blog) and Entrecard page
• Leaders Are Readers (blog) and Entrecard page
• Favorite Online Resources (blog) and Entrecard page
• Life Wealth (blog) and Entrecard page
• Forward Steps Notice Board (blog) and Entrecard page
• Wealth And Money (blog) and Entrecard page
• Triggers Personal Development Ezine (blog) and Entrecard page

UPDATE: All three blogs really have been deleted. I’ve just received the following email:

Your account ‘On Blogging Australia’ on entrecard.com has been deleted. The administrator gave the following reason:

rule 7, http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=blog_quality_standards

Please contact deleted@entrecard.com if you have any questions regarding this action.

Please include the following:
User ID: XXXX

It’s official, I really do no longer have a relationship with Entrecard. Anyone who has in mind to criticise them, please take this as an example. No satisfactory answers, only snarkiness - then deletion.

The terms include a section giving Google “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.” That seems pretty extreme for a browser, doesn’t it?

So, shit. If I post to a blog that I own, on my own hosting, that I have contributed to for a couple of years, but I do it through the Google Chrome browser, does Google then own my blog? Or that post?

What do you think?

UPDATE: Google has changed the Terms of Service - see the explanation/apology from Matt Cutts (thanks Keiron for the link) and some background from ReadWriteWeb (update to the original post).

When I started blogging seriously, I wanted to be a truly Great Blogger. Note the capitalisation. Great with a capital G. Not just successful, but truly Great.

“Andrew, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“This week, man, I would like to be a truly Great Blogger”

Great meant many things. It meant being a full-time blogger, talking at conferences about blogging, nodding sagely at appropriate moments when brought into corporate boardrooms as The Blogging Consultant, drinking a lot of beer, signing t-shirts and never really working a minute again in my whole life.

Does that work for you? As fantasy careers go, it certainly worked for me.

Now, I could spend the rest of this post slagging off at the “make money blogging” people, and talk about how the only people making money blogging are those selling “make money blogging” books and courses. But that would be wrong - and besides the point. I know that you can make money from blogging, and I know that for me I will make more money consulting and contracting about Information Architecture and user experience design. It is what I am good at, and the money is really very good too.

What I will do is pitch a new concept of “Great” to you. Here it is, for free:

You are a Truly Great Blogger In Capitals If It Makes You And Your Readers Happy.

Now that I am semi-retired from the hurly-burly life of serious blogging, I can say unequivocably that the blogs I read are the ones that make me happy - like Magneto Bold Too and I Can Haz Cheezburger. My favourite blogs make me laugh, others make me cry, and all of them make me feel. I used to read blogs that made me happy out of a sense of duty to their authors - they read my blog, I read theirs. The blogs I felt that I had to read were the ones that would give me the winning edge over all the other ProBlogger wannabes - the perfect angle, the perfect post, the perfect Great Blogger cred.

Screw that

What do you think? Am I nuts, reading and blogging only for pleasure? Am I Great now, or was I Greater before?

Friends. You gotta have them. Apparently

Seriously though, it would be a pretty sad place without friends.

There are a number of posts around the metablogging community on exploiting the power of social networks to build blog presence (in other words, grab more readers). Since I’ve returned to blogging-for-pleasure rather than as a duty, I’ve realised that this advice is wrong. It misses the point.

Here it is, the secret of blogging, and I’m not going to charge you a cent to read it:

Blogging is about the people

Wow, it feels better to say that. Let me say it again:

Blogging is about the people.

It is not about exploiting social networks, or advertising money, or selling a point. It can be used for all of these things, but that is not what it is at the very heart of it.

It took me a long time to figure that out. I’ve met a lot of people (in real life, online, or both) through blogging - I spend more time interacting with these people via Plurk and Twitter than I do writing blog posts.

Social networking is, like blogging, about the people. If you are out there selling me something when I want to be relaxing in front of Plurk or Twitter, I will de-friend/un-follow/block you as quick as I can - and I know many other people who do as well. We’re not there to be told which blog posts to read, we are not someone’s target audience - only with time and trust comes the right to twitterpimp to a wide audience - anything else is spam.

So - my two cents worth - the only way to truly exploit the power of social networking is to not exploit it, but be a full participant in it - and what you give, you will truly get back and then some.

So… you think you are pretty hot. You’ve got 30 followers on Twitter, FeedBurner tells you that more than a dozen people read every post you write, and your Analytics figures are on an upwards trend.

So you decide that this blogging lark is easy, and if you can make 50 cents a month from one blog in AdSense income, think of how well you could do with ten blogs, or twenty, or thirty…

That is usually where things come unstuck. I know they did for me.

Here is what I’ve learnt about expanding the number of blogs you write for: if you get bored, things go pear shaped a lot faster with ten blogs than they do with one.

I set out to start my own blog empire - I bought up around 70 domain names, had business plans for 30 blogs that included the research and process that I needed to make each one a success in its own niche. I even started blogging about it at The Blog Collector and Polyblogging.

What went wrong? I put it down to two factors:

1. I overcommitted (which is easy to do when enthusiastic) - but this is not fatal in and of itself. The enthusiastic can often build teams of people who are capable of keeping a project alive beyond their own initial burst of energy.
2. Then - and this was fatal - I got bored with it. Well, not exactly bored, more that I went through a relationship breakup at a time when work was flogging me to death, and I lost most of my energy and all motivation for non-work projects. I literally spent all downtime away from work itself (and I was doing a lot of work after hours at home) either sleeping or switching off totally - watching TV in a dazed state.

The feeling of constant low-level overwhelm (one of the Signs you’re overworked) helped to compound the sense of helplessness I felt at not being able to keep up with my blogging commitments. So I ended up easing my way out of them - allowing blogs to lie fallow. Coming to the realisation that pagerank and Technorati really didn’t matter any more allowed me to return to where I started - blog as release rather than obligation.

I still post to some of the other blogs on occasion - and that way I can comfort myself with the fact that I am staying within my niche, which I know will help if I ever get serious about blogging again.

So… my advice is - think carefully before overextending yourself, but do it if you want to - just don’t be too hard on yourself if you fail to become a blogging millionaire overnight.

But first… the bottom line
Let’s be a little lateral and cut straight to the chase - the bottom line to me is this:

It doesn’t matter how wonderful your PhotoShop or CSS skills are - anything that gets in the way of your readers reading your blog is your enemy and theirs - and you should start and end blog design by crippling anything that gets in the way.

Holy cow, Andrew, isn’t that a little bit harsh?

Yes, it is harsh, but no-one is going to admire your fancy theme if they can’t read your posts.

Layout
How does layout help or hinder blog readability? There are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• Context is king: clear titles, meaningful navigation and identifiable sub-headings let your readers know where they are, and what they are looking at. They probably won’t always come into your blog at the home page - they need to know which blog they are reading, what the subject matter contains, and how to get more information if they want it.
• Use the power of visual hierarchy: clear visual hierarchy is a fancy way of saying “make the important stuff stand out”. Following on from the last point, ‘clear titles’ means that (a) all headings stand out, (b) they are usually but not always larger than the surrounding text, and (c) the ads or anything else are not the biggest visual elements on the page.

One print layout trick I use is to view the blog from across the room - without reading the titles, can you see where the main blog heading, article titles and subtitles are in the page?

Colour
Does colour matter? Absolutely - if it gets in the way. I’m a bugger for dropping people in the cack without talking with them first, so I won’t name names, but there are some truly ugly blog themes out there.

Without sufficient contrast, colours can make text almost impossible to read. Try green text on a red background (or worse, dark grey on black) and you’ll see what I mean. The World Wide Web Consortium (w3.org) sets guidelines for minimum colour contrast - the following is from the CSS Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0:

Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has a smaller monitor than you, or poorer eyesight, or a black and white screen.

Styles
Styles can be set using CSS. Here’s what I wrote about it in WordPress Theme Editing: The Actual Coding:

Changing your theme’s CSS is the easiest way to affect the look and feel. CSS controls a lot - when fully utilised it controls the size, colour, position, text style, mouse over behaviour, you name it, of every visible part of your blog.

This is an example of a single element taken from the style.css file for this blog:

body {
background: #CCFFCC;
color: #545454;
padding: 13px 0 25px 0;
}

It started out life looking like this:

body {
background: #3c3c3c;
color: #545454;
padding: 13px 0 25px 0;
}

What did I change? Basically all I did was change one of the colours - the background went from a shade of grey (#3c3c3c) to a shade of green (#CCFFCC). You can do this, save your work (through the Update File button on Dashboard > Presentation > Themes) and have a look at your blog to see what has changed.

Aussies please note: most coding languages were developed by people who couldn’t spell - a common error for Australian beginners is to spell “color” as “colour” and “center” as “centre”

Here is how you can start playing with CSS:

1. Read about surviving the process
2. In your WordPress blog, go to Dashboard > Presentation > Theme Editor and find your stylesheet (it is probably called Stylesheet inside WordPress but is actually a file called style.css)
3. Look for something that you recognise - a heading style, a page background, a sidebar style - and change it. Look at the result - is it what you wanted? If not, change it again, and check the result.
4. When you are confident that you know what you are changing (and how to change it back!), play by changing a lot of different elements. Check constantly so that you are changing the things that you think you are - and in this way, you will come to ‘master’ that particular theme.

To learn more (because there is a heck of a lot more to it than that):

• Flick through the colorlab colour wheel at Visibone,
• Check out the W3Schools beginning CSS tutorial, (it has a good explanation of the theory behind CSS) and
• Look at the CSSTutorial.net CSS tutorial that has some good practical examples.

Conclusion
There is more to blogging life than design considerations - but please consider this: it is hard enough to get and keep readers - if your blog design is getting in the way, then you will annoy some people enough that they will leave immediately and never return.