Skip to main content

10 Common Mistakes Made By Newbie Bloggers

Always Make New Mistakes - Esther DysonBlogging is all about building a good relationship with readers and fellow bloggers. There however exists a a set of ground rules / guidelines that we must adhere to else we run the risk of breaking those relationships.

Here are the 10 most common mistakes made by bloggers especially those who are new to the game:

1. We copy images from other websites and upload them on our own blog without credit or attribution.

2. We indulge in bandwidth theft by hotlinking pictures, music(mp3) or video files on our blog.

3. Though we credit the owner of the image in our blog posts, we add watermarks or overlay text to the images without permission.

4. We do not disclose the actual source of information. Even if the idea is taken from an offline source (like a print-only newspaper), it should be given due credit in blog posts.

5. Plagiarism - We copy-paste content from other sources to our own blogs. Always remember that web plagiarism is easy to detect and might tarnish your credibility in the blogosphere forever.

6. We are using web icons from other sites. [Like other images, icons have to be credited to the designer]

7. Our HTML code has JavaScript snippets written by other developers who requested that the credit text be left untouched but we removed the "non essential" text so as to reduce the size of our HTML files.

8. We make it extremely hard for readers to subscribe to our blog. Always keep the feed icon and the email subscription form above the main fold where reader can locate it without effort.

9. We are not respecting the Creative Commons License. For example, if a Flickr image is available under "No Derivative Works" license, you are not supposed to crop or resize that image.

10. Our "About Page" is incomplete and filled with the default placeholder text. You are giving new readers an extra reason for not subscribing to your blog.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.