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Round 8 opens tonight at midnight. It ends on the 5th at 11:59 PM EST. Feel free to browse the tips written in the past for ideas on how to improve your site. Continuing the tradition – a tip before the round opens.

One of the things that is very clear interacting with people about their blogs is how rare it is for bloggers to have neutral feedback on their site. From people who are strangers, with nothing to gain from being honest about your site. For example, a friend or family member might not give you the real deal about what they are thinking because he/she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. But there is another reason for doing this. Having someone you don’t know browse your site and give feedback will give you a different perspective on your site.

When I want an objective opinion I go to the library (or another public place I can whip out a laptop) and ask people to surf the site. I pay close attention to the expression on their face and which pages they go to first. How far do they scroll down the page? Does anything catch their attention? Their expressions can be priceless at times – giving away what they “really” thought. They liked the site and hated the color combinations on the site. They liked the design but the content didn’t interest them. I usually ask at least five people. This isn’t a lot of people, obviously, but it is enough to spot design problems when they all have similar reactions.

Remember that everyone won’t see your site as you see it.

I look forward to reviewing your site Round 8. If you have any questions, let me know.

Update: I have responded to everyone that emailed me about site feedback. As of 5:00pm EST I’m not accepting any others because I cannot respond in time before the round opens up.

On Twitter today I noticed a comment I thought would be good to address in a blog entry. WebFwrd says:

Seriously, 9rules should enable at least summary in their Feeds instead of just title.

I’m going to explain why we don’t do that.

On 9rules we use the writer’s RSS feed to pull the information. Usually summaries pull the first 50 or so words in an entry to display to the reader as a “preview” or lead-in for what the article is about.

Using WebFwrd’s blog as an example, this is the feed for the blog that is listed on the Twitter profile. The first entry (as of this writing) is an image, so no summary or excerpt would show. The second entry is a normal entry. Let’s pull the first 50 words of the article:

Well, I have not been able to release any update for Diana at all this few weeks. All due to increasing projects and workloads that I do not have any available time set for Diana’s updates yet But it is not going to die this way, probably I will set aside…

This is what happens most of the time when the first X number of characters are shown as a summary. The summary doesn’t show enough information to give the reader a clear understanding of the article. This can go two ways. Using the example above the reader could see the article is about lack of updates and move on, completely missing the plans the writer stated in the entry (the meat of the article). Or the reader could see the title of the entry (Updates for Diana) and if interested in that topic, click over and see the upcoming plans detailed in the article. Let’s look at another example, my last 9rules article:

I might not be processing the new members for the next couple of days. Ike did a job on my city and I’m at a library sending this. They are estimating a couple days until power is restored. No clue when it will be restored.
I am keeping track of those

Forget the formatting issues with this and notice the same thing happens. The important information (do not send a second email) is in the second paragraph. In both cases the user could read the summary and think he/she has enough information to make an informed decision to click through but in truth, the “important stuff” is lost. Most bloggers do not write their articles so the important information is in the first 50-something words. Those that post images for an entry wouldn’t display anything at all – their profile page would look empty in comparison to the other members.

An example of a site that has excellent summaries is Ars Technica. Look at their feed. They write excerpts for their entries so people click over to read the article. That is the ideal situation for summaries.

WebFwrd asked a good question and the reason I decided to blog about it: you might want to consider adding excerpts to your entries. Some content management systems use the excerpts for search results as well. If you use partial RSS feeds over full feeds using an excerpt would most likely help your click-through ratio because the reader would see exactly what the article is about, not what happens to be the first 50 words.

That is why 9rules does not have summaries…we would not want to place further requirements on our members. We used to have summaries but the only time they are of value for the reader, across the board, is if all members adopted the Ars Technica style of creating them. You might want to consider trying them out on your blog, especially if you use partial feeds or full feeds.

Thanks WebFwrd for bringing the topic up!

Round 7 begins Wednesday August 6th. I thought I’d answer some common questions that arise and give one last site tip before the round begins. First, the answers to some common questions:

1. The round starts on Wednesday August 6th at midnight EST and ends at 11:59pm EST.
2. You do not have to be the owner of the site to submit it (the owner can have someone submit their site for them).
3. We only accept sites that have at least six months of consistent writing. Usually after six months a new blogger has a feel for their writing style, how often they want to update their site and have more surety in the topic they wish to write about. It is not uncommon for someone to start a blog and in two months move on to something else or stop writing completely.
4. The next round will be November 5th, 2008.
5. What do we look for? There are a bunch of site tips that help explain what we look for.
6. If your site was not accepted in a previous round you can submit your site for this round (particularly if your site was not accepted last round if you emailed me, I responded as to why the site was not accepted).

If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask. You can send me an email at tyme@9rules.com if you’d like.

Ok, on to the tip….

It is not unusual for site owners to change domains, content management systems or make changes to the site that cause the RSS feed for the site to change. In order to insure that no readers are lost the site owner needs to set up a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. I’m going to give you a live example (until the site fixes it of course lol).

A Socialite’s Life feed is in my feed reader. I have quite a few RSS feeds in the feed reader and although I noticed the feed reader was unable to access their feed, I forgot about it. It was weeks later that I decided to check out why the error was still there after so much time. Their site changed (I have no idea about all the changes that happened) but the feed URL changed from this to this. They redirected their old URL to the new one and redirected old URLs of articles to the new URLs but didn’t touch the feed URL I used. The last update I received in my RSS reader was June 12, 2008.

Now here’s the problem to the site owner and why to avoid this as much as possible: I still feel “informed” even without their content in my feed reader. I have nothing against the site and they do have original content but for weeks I did fine without them, why should I edit the URL in my feed reader? The odds are that most readers in my position would remove the RSS over checking to see why it no longer works and taking the extra step to edit it. A reader will if they “missed” the updates or felt uninformed on the topic. Keep in mind with “news” it is all about who covers it first sometimes (unless there is unique commentary). I remember there were times when Socialite’s Life covered it first and I clicked to their site and browsed around or someone else covered it – the news balanced out. Perhaps I am getting the same news an hour or two later (or whatever) but I’m not feeling unformed. I still haven’t edited the feed’s URL and that is the key for a site owner: updating the bad URLs before the reader removes them.

As many times as I’ve changed domains and flip-flopped between content management systems I know exactly what this is like. I care more about interaction than traffic (stats) but I do check the error logs periodically and that is how you can find if people are attempting to access something and receiving and error.

Check your error logs people! You might be shocked to see what you find.

I look forward to reviewing your site Round 7. If you have any questions, let me know.

I have a question and I want you to be honest. Many sites integrate a “thank you” to their sponsors, listing the sponsors and perhaps some blurb about the company, as an entry on their site. These posts most likely will remain in the archive and usually appears in the RSS feed.

My question: Do you read those entries?

Personally, I don’t read them. I asked about 15 people I see online if they read them – they don’t. I don’t read them because they have zero value to me. I’d more likely click on an ad than pay attention to the “thank you” articles. Why? Because they usually aren’t tailored to be of any benefit to the reader. They are tailored more to fulfill an obligation to the advertiser.

As a blog owner, if you do that…why? Wouldn’t it be a win/win situation if the reader paid attention to content and clicked on it? Wouldn’t that make the blog/site more appealing to seek advertising in the future? Wouldn’t that give the site/blog an edge over others?

So tell me, do you read the thank you to our sponsor entries, particularly if they appear in your feed reader?

Reading the 9rules member feeds, I came across an article by Brajeshwar that I think everyone can benefit from. He describes how he found foreign code in the header file.

I woke up today morning to find that my site feed wasn’t validating and the XMLRPC was not responding when I tried to update MarsEdit. Upon doing a quick “View Source” I found a foreign code lodged on top of my site’s header. I knew instantly that it shouldn’t be there and that something is wrong.

Brajeshwar uses his own theme so he knew that code didn’t belong there. For the average WordPress user viewing the source code would be like trying to understand a language he or she does not speak. An example: for those that drive how many people can fix the car they drive if it breaks? Mechanics can but most people have to take the car in to be repaired. Same with a blog; many people use blogging tools but if something goes wrong are unable to diagnose and repair/resolve the issue.

Brajeshwar gives an easy to follow guide on the steps he used to secure his site, even sharing the code for an .htaccess file that prevents comment spam by denying access to no-referrer requests. Take a moment and read the article. You might learn something.

This article isn’t about WordPress being unsafe because honestly, all scripts will have vulnerabilities from time to time. Pay more attention to how quickly the company patches the security issues and informs their user base. When a patch is released, update your scripts as soon as possible.

This article is about paying more attention to your site than just posting entries. This is a situation the average user wouldn’t notice without looking for it. Just like a lawn has to be cared for in order to maintain it, your blog needs attention if your content is to remain safe, no matter what content management system you are using.