• If you have your Twitter client configured to use a third-party link shortener, get rid of that configuration: if I see a link in your tweet, I want to have an idea about where the link might lead before clicking on it. And if you are using a third party link shortener that directs to a third party wrapper around the target page, get rid of that configuration and then say a hundred Hail Marys as penance.
  • If you don’t get advertising revenue from your blog, configure the RSS feed to include full text and pictures. Yes, I’ll sometimes go to your site, but generally I’d rather just read what you’ve written in my feed reader. Partly because of laziness, partly to avoid network/rendering delays, but partly because feed readers format blogs in a more readable way than most blogs layouts/stylesheets do. (On which note: attractive layout that doesn’t interfere with readability is the main reason why I will bother to go to your site.)
  • Speaking of which, if you have a blog (or whatever word you want to refer to something RSS-accessible), subscribe to it in a feed reader, so you can see what it looks like in that environment.
  • And if you do regularly publish content somewhere, do please make an RSS feed accessible and easily discoverable. Yes, RSS isn’t trendy these days, but it still works great.
  • If I’m reading your web page and I reach the bottom of what’s visible on screen and hit space/page-down, I should be able to continue reading: I shouldn’t need to manually scroll to avoid missing lines of text. In fact, just stop using those trendy navigation bars that are fixed to the top of the screen, even if they’re thin enough to not interfere with scrolling: they’re all about you and your brand, they’re never useful for the reader.

Yours in grumpiness.

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