A few blog site guidelines

Adding feeds to Planet Tech Art, it became clear that not everyone studies great bloggers like Scott Hanselman or Dave Winer. Here are some rules:

• Your full name should appear somewhere on your main page. Prominently if you are advertising yourself, but at least somewhere in the footer or header. There were some blogs where even a first name was absolutely nowhere to be found. Unacceptable.
• A link to your feed should be somewhere on your main page. In order of preference- top/top of sidebar, sidebar, bottom. I visited several blogs that did not have an RSS feed anywhere. Again, unacceptable.
• Make your first few works count. Many more people will see an excerpt than read your entire post, make sure the first couple sentences don’t say ‘Sorry I haven’t posted for a while’ or something similar.
• Make sure your name is in your blog feed. Or something to identify you. For Planet, this is taken care of automatically, but subscribe to your own feed and make sure it is recognizable.
• Speaking of subscribing to your own feed- subscribe to your own feed and make sure your posts are formatted in RSS properly. I’ve seen more than a few with missed code samples and other plugin-dependent data.

Happy blogging.