Burst Blog

How did I let this happen?

The Mustang sat in a sorry state. Years of neglect hung heavy on the once-glorious sheetmetal; once eluded through great care, rust was now peeking through paint in the usual places. Dry rotted tires had long since ceased to hold air, door and hood hinges popped and moaned with any movement (as I winced with mechanical sympathy) and worst of all, I could detect that small mammals of the North Carolina piedmont had made several small homes within the confines of what was once my pride and joy. The only rent paid was empty seed husks and a variety of nesting materials.

This was my task - to bring this Mustang back from the brink. And your task, as a blogger, is to prevent your blog from falling into disrepair - much as I failed to do with the car. I can assure you that the old saw is unfortunately, and quite expensively, true - an ounce of prevention is very much worth a pound of cure.

A fresh coat of paint

One of the more obvious ways to make your blog look factory fresh is with a new color scheme - and unlike the old Mustang, it won’t cost you a thing. I’m sure that you’ve visited web sites or blogs that looked dated - or worse, were actually painful to look at. Take a moment to assess your blog’s color scheme critically, and ask yourself if you’re happy with it. Make sure that it has enough contrast between text and background to assure easy reading. I prefer tight palettes (for instance, a color scheme that has only one or two colors and their variants to work with - like dark brown text on a light tan background) and that also avoids chromatic extremes. You actually can have too much contrast, in my opinion, so go for mid-darks and mid-lights. The very worst thing you can do is juxtapose a high-saturation red against a high-saturation blue. It shimmers horribly! Avoid.

Fortunately, most blog software makes it incredibly easy to swap between themes and palettes, or create your own - or rely on the creativity of others and grab widely-available additional themes. It is worth experimenting with - you’ll probably find something that you really like, and I’m sure your readers will like it too.

The radio doesn’t work

Something I see far too often is a feed that stops broadcasting. This can happen for a few different reasons, but sometimes the feed just flat-out breaks. Don’t take it for granted that your feed is working correctly - check it every so often by opening your feed URL in a browser window, and check that it matches your blog’s actual entries - particularly the most recent. Probably the most common cause of feed breakage is using MS Word to create your entries, and copy-pasting them in. MS Word has special characters that are widely known to break a feed. Simply put - don’t do that! Find a less “feature-rich” editor to write your entries in. You’ll be glad you did.

Too many gaudy aftermarket parts

As I accumulate gray hair on my chin, my enthusuasm for aftermarket add-ons of dubious quality and taste has, fortunately, diminished. The Mustang looks best as it did when it left San Jose in 1965, with just a smattering of vintage hop-up parts for a bit of spice and speed. The underbody lighting kits, radical suspension adjustments and bass-drunk subwoofers, I will leave for the current generation of “tuner” youth to explore. More often than not, these bolt-ons are a waste of money as they tend to diminish the overall function of the vehicle.

With so many plug-ins, add-ons, and other flashy bits to add to one’s blog, it is tempting to throw caution to the wind and build your blog to the hilt with “added functionality.” However, caution is required. Nothing is worse than having a bunch of add-ons on your blog - and then, having one of them break your blog or feed. It greatly complicates diagnosis, and more often than not, your friendly tech support agent will tell you to strip them all off in order to properly assess the situation. (I know, because I used to be one of those support folks.) My recommendation is to avoid the temptation to go hog wild, and only use a minimum of plug-ins and widgets. Easier said than done, I realize, but your blog will be far more trouble-free for doing this, and you’ll have far fewer updates to chase.

You are updating your blog software and plug-ins… aren’t you? I sure hope so, otherwise…

Someone broke in and trashed everything

Fortunately no person has ever broken into the old Mustang (aside from minor damage from the rodentia) - however, I can’t say the same for my hated Celebrity. The Celebrity was the automotive enthusiast’s equivalent of a lonely, gray exile - boring from all angles, dreadful from behind the wheel, and unreliable too - just to pour salt into the wound. I figured the rest of the world viewed the car with the same sense of pitiful worthlessness that I did… imagine my surprise when I returned home one day (after a walk back from the university campus) to discover that someone had broken in and scattered my belongings all over the yard. The thieves took nothing of value - except my peace of mind.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, there are far more ways to break into your blog than there were ways into my old beater car. Luck isn’t enough. Belief that your blog isn’t worth breaking into isn’t enough. Security requires vigilance and a bit of work - but it beats discovering that your blog has been exploited, and (in the worst case) it beats regretfully deleting your blog and starting over, if the corruption of your blog is too extreme.

Fortunately, by updating your blogging software and plug-ins regularly, you substantially increase the chances of successfully fending off an attack with relatively little work on your part. There are also some decisions you can make regarding the ways in which you handle links, comments, and other things that can also make a difference - and your blog’s platform almost certainly has some sound advice on its support pages or FAQ regarding best practices and things to avoid. It might sound like a hassle but it beats having to pull your blog back from the brink, using back-ups.

You, of course, are regularly making back-ups… right?

Show and shine

If you take a little time every now and then to keep your blog’s software updated, make tweaks here and there, and keep the add-ons down to a reasonable level, you’ll have a blog that you’ll continue to enjoy (since it is much less likely to fall apart unexpectedly) and your readers will appreciate your rock-solid and consistent uptime. Maybe you can’t drive it to the Dairy Queen for the local show-and-shine, as I did with the Mustang this evening, but you will have pride of ownership just the same. You’ll almost certainly have spent far less money than I did, too.