Note to self

Dear blog,

How are you doing today? As for me I'm feeling okay I guess. I noticed you've been rather busy lately. Ever since you started appearing on Petalingstreet.org last weekend there's been an influx of visitors here. From a meagre 12 visitors a day, you now have tripled that amount in just days. I know you should feel excited, overwhelmed even. I even wondered where have Petalingstreet.org been all this time myself.

Nevertheless I hope you don't get carried away with this. It was never my intention to blog for fame, fortune or glory. The main reason I blog in the first place was to chronicle stuff that happened in my life. Exciting stuff, mundane things, events, news etcetera. Apart from that, I blog so that my kid(s) and my future generation can read, laugh about and learn what's going on in this crazy old man's head. As long as Google doesn't go bust anytime soon, I hope that my musings will be here for all to see.

So you see site traffic or the amount of comments I get everyday doesn't concern me much. I don't mind if 60 or only 6 people visit my blog everyday. I read from somewhere 90% of visitors to your blog is just that, visitors. They come, they read and they leave. They probably won't leave a comment of attempt to communicate with you and if your blog don't interest them enough, chances are they won't come back. Another 5% find your blog quite interesting, leave a comment now and then but just don't have the time get involved more with your blog. The final 5% is what they call a regular/fan of your blog. They come everyday, bookmark your RSS feed or something and leave comments all the time.

After 5 months, I've learned a lot of things about blogging from my blogger friends and also numerous blogs that I read everyday. I don't claim to be an expert in blogging but here's a few important lessons that I've learnt so far.

I know it's your blog and you can put anything you want to there BUT auto-playing audio/video stream is a mortal sin in blogging. Bear in mind that not all Internet connections are created equal. While Internet users in Germany enjoy 14MB connection, our friends in inner Mongolia (or Malaysia) might be surfing at a sluggish 14.4KB connection. Putting flash-based audio/video players on your blog will definitely make them much longer to load thus frustrating your visitors. Honestly, I won't wait longer than 10 seconds for any web page to load if I can help it. If you really had to put a streaming audio/video file there, please-please turn off the auto-play feature. I'm not teaching anybody how to design their blog but I do believe a lot of people out there share the same sentiment with me :)

Any graphic/photos larger than medium in size (in Blogger for example) is a BIG no no. It's fine if you got like 5 very big pictures per month on your blog. But imagine browsing through a month long archive of your post with a lot of very large pictures in it. It will take forever to load. I was guilty of this lack of foresight myself earlier on with my blog. That's why my January and February archive took quite a long time to load (anything more than 20 seconds is a long time by today's web page standard). That's why I regularly crop and resize my photos so that they wouldn't be too much of a burden to load.

Other than that I promise to be a good sport and reply to all memes/tags given to me. Just because somebody didn't bother to reply to my tag, I will frown and brood and plan my revenge on them (ha ha!). I understand they might be too busy to reply, feeling unwell or they just plain don't like me :)

Plus if I link anybody's blog to my blog, I don't expect them to return the favour for me. I know I'm not a femes blogger or anything and my blog is just a waste of pixels on their screen, I won't go begging to them so that they link back to me. Not just any blog deserves to be blogroll you know and I only list the ones that I find most interesting and worth visiting everyday. So you should be really-really honoured if you find your blog listed there on my humble page. Anyway, I change my blogroll all the time so... <-- This guy is mental! Something is contributing to those annoying pop-ups on my blog. I suspect they came from one of those scripts/page elements but I'm not sure which one is it. It could be from Snap.com, that flash mp3 player, cbox or even my recent comments script. I won't bother to check for now but I do pity my visitors without pop-up blockers in their browsers (yes, such browsers still exists - think IE6). IMO, pop-ups are the most annoying thing ever (next to Man United fans).

One more thing. Many people don't know this but we can actually pre-post our blog. This mean we can set the exact time and date of when our is published, whether in the future or the past. Just click on Post Options and set whatever date and time you like your post to be published on. This feature is particularly useful when you usually blog on office time and you don't your boss to find out. This post for example is actually written on May 30th but instead it will appears to be published yesterday (May 29th) at 12:02 a.m which is definitely not during office hours. Likewise if you'd like your post to appear on 1st January 2020, by all mean go ahead and pre-post your blog on that date.





Last but not least, if your think your boss is reading your blog, chances are HE IS READING your blog so better think twice before you bad mouth him or the company, if you'd like to keep your job that is. A lot of companies have servers or proxies that keep record of websites visited by their employees so they KNOW where you've been.

I think that's about it for now. So until we meet again, bye.

Sign

Afif