THE BLOGGING CLASS ::: LESSON THREE

Two weeks ago Xiaxue tweeted that she hates blogs that feature videos and blogs that beckon one to "read more" ... like this one.

According to PCWORLD ::: dial-up business still accounts for about 40 percent of AOL's revenue; AOL still has about 2 million US subscribers to that service! Xiaxue's blog loads on dial-up! But lots of other blogs don't!

Here's one blog landing page that's really confusing! There's no need for the "slider" at the top, as it displays post after post without any apparent dating, although it does show the number of "views" which nobody cares about, except maybe for the blogger herself (no offense, Ms. Lainy- this post is for instructional purposes only, and you are entitled to run your blog any way you want)... there's a lot going on, a lot to load on this particular blog, and you really need high-speed broadband to experience it (once you get past that bewildering slider!) I checked the blog's HTML Markup coding (through a 3rd party) and found "395 Errors, 212 warning(s)." In profiling the readers of the "Lainyblog" I found they are of this ilk:

"When the Wi-fi doesn't connect to a teenager's laptop instantly, there's a cry of "It's not working!". Followed, inevitably, by a "OK!" five seconds later. I understand that it might take the laptop's OS a few seconds to get itself hooked up with Wi-fi and negotiate the appropriate protocols and encryption (and even then I marvel that it's all taking place so quickly), but the modern user doesn't and subsequently gets frustrated because it doesn't happen 'instantly'.

When a modern user clicks to 'upload' their latest photo to Facebook and gets fed up after 15 seconds because it's "obviously not working", cancelling the process and doing something else instead, I think "But you've just taken a 5 megapixel photo, it's 1MB in size and you're only on vanilla 3G connection, so even going as its fastest it's going to take at least 30 seconds". There's little appreciation for the facts and figures, for the nuts and bolts of technology anymore.

In a corporate context, I'm often hearing of users complaining that their "email is slow" - when a system manager looks into their case, they've usually accrued something horrendous like a 10GB Outlook PST file, of which a substantial portion is made up of those 'fun joke emails with videos', stored multiple times as they get forwarded around the office...[SouRce]"

I can understand that videos would certainly annoy some people. I put them up on my blog here every now and then. Those of you who regularly visit here know that I use dial-up extensively, and believe me, videos DO NOT slow down loading time! I find that, for example, youtube videos load up just fine... it's the act of PLAYING those videos that you really don't want to think about doing on a slow connection!

So, what have learned today?
K.I.S.S.
Keep it simple, stupid!

Strip the excess widgets, graphics and garbage as best you can from your blog. Take a look at this PR7 blog, then compare it with this blog. You see you can still present a popourri of posts, links and information without choking the broadband pipeline or shutting out dial-up netizens!