A most unscientific blog comparison!

The All Important Notes

The other day, I decided to see how compliant my blog is, and found this useful site: UITest. It collects a bunch of tests together in one page. Well I fared quite poorly (see below). If I am going down, I am bloody well taking the rest of you down with me! And so, I decided to test out some of the popular blogs. Please do not take this as a serious evaluation! It is highly unscientific and utterly silly

There are things I would have liked to measure, such as how blog reader friendly a blog is, but that would require actual effort!

Test environment: Firefox 1.5, screen 1024×768, 12pt Helvetica (default font)

The Blogs and Ranks

• HuffPo = The Huffington Post
• dKos = Daily Kos
• C&L = Crooks and Liars
• TProg = Think Progress
• Malkin = Michelle Malkin
• PwrLine = PowerLine

The rank is based on Technorati ranking of blogs as of Oct 10,
2006 or thereabouts. The URLs used for testing where the ones
listed in the Technorati listing. Some of these blogs/bloggers
have more than one blog (HuffPo, Malkin), in which case I
chose the higher ranked one. Also, I wanted a partisan blog
shootout and had to make judgement calls: I did not include
InstaPundit and Little Green Footballs. You may disagree!

Times are in seconds.

Validity

• W3C XHTML is XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• W3C HTML is HTML 4.01 Transitional
• If a site passed XHTML 1.0 no need to test HTML 4.01
• Truwex is a report of a range of issues
• Spelling was filtered for names, nicknames, acronyms, popular word corruptions, etc.
• Special kudos to C&L for getting the spelling of dialogue right, and Michelle Malkin for getting neighbour right!

Accessibility

• Frankly, I do not know a lot about these guidelines and tests.
• The ATRC test reports known, likely and potential problems: I have listed the known and included the total in brackets.
• The UIUC FAE test lists 5 main categories and provides % of failures for each: I have crudely added all the %s together.
• WebXACT results are broken down by 3 priorities and lists errors and warnings: I have added up the error incidents.

Subjective

• One thing I hate more than all else is the single-window assumption: anything larger than 750-800 pixels should be banished back to the times before windowing and multi-tasking!
• Design… well, that's really subjective isn't it? Along with aesthetics, I look for consistency of UI, use of colour, contrast, spacing, use of markup, and so on. Malkin for example uses "***" as markup… surely better options are available? Malkin and ThinkProgress (and to a lesser extent PowerLine) have an uncluttered and well-structured interface.
• Many folks read blogs through a blog reader that may list only post headings: are these clear enough to tell me what the post is about?
• And what about the post contents? Don't you hate cryptic one-liners which serve as a link to an external page with the real info? ThinkProgress, C&L, and Malkin (to a lesser extent) seem to enjoy this sport.
• What's a blog without a feed? How clear and prominent is/are the feed link(s)? If your feed link says "XML" you get a negative point! If it uses the new standardised feed icon, you get a positive.
• How cluttered and crazy is the sidebar? Are tags or categories offered for readers to focus on their area of interest?
• To give you an idea of spelling errors I found:
  Kos: whever, TProg: prescise, Malkin: afor.

A look at the Glass House

How did Plato's Beard fare?

• Spell: 0 errors! How would I know?
• Seomoz page strength: cannot even fetch the page
• MS Adcenter says: neutral (0.5) under 18 years (24.17%)
• Truwex Page check: 22 issues
• Size/speed: 201kB, 40.17s (56K), 1.26s (T1)
• ATRC: 14 known, 0 likely, 286 potential
• UIUC: 201
• W3C: XHTML 1.0 Trans: 84 errors, HTML 4.01 Trans: 53 errors
• Width: 700px
• Headings: B
• Feed Link(s): A
• Content(s): zero ;-)

If you use the Ecto blogging client you might find my script LuckyLink (link below) of interest. It supports Wiki style syntax markup of text, which it will perform an operation on. Currently there is only one supported operation: Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" links.

Usage:

Simple markup:

• Enclose text to be linked in [[ ]]

  e.g: [[ Noam Chomsky ]]

  This will generate a link (to the site returned by Google's I'm Feeling Lucky) around the text Noam Chomsky.

You can specify something different to search for using the following two variations (in both cases only "display text" will be retained):

• [[ display text | search text ]]

  e.g: [[ Chomsky's book | site:amazon.com Hegemony Survival ]]

  This will use the part after the | to do the search and wrap the first part (Chomsky's book) in the link returned.

• [[ display text |+ additional search text ]]

  e.g: A few bits from [[ Chomsky's Hegemony |+ excerpts ]]

  This will use both the first part and the second part, together, for the search, but only use the first part for the linked text.

• Spaces after/before opening/closing brackets and around | and |+ are optional.
• Text can't have a | of course.

Some words of warning

• The syntax supported by the script is bound to change as I flesh it out.
• This is a 0.001 alpha script and a fairly trivial one. Use at your own risk.
• This script requires Perl and 'wget' (use DarwinPorts or search for "wget for Windows")
• In Ecto, see Scripts => What is This?, for installation help.

Cybernet has information on a new blog editor/client released by Microsoft called Live Writer. It’s free but available only for Windows, of course. You can download it here.

I fired up the old Windows box to give it a try and its seems pretty good. Not as good as ecto, but pretty decent. Worked with WordPress as the blog server (auto-detected), and I assume will work with MT, Blogger, etc.

Guess who’s blogging?

http://www.ahmadinejad.ir/

Currently down with error:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Some info is available at BBC.

First you have to publish a blog, but now that’s pretty overdone. You syndicate it through FeedBurner, get yourself on Technorati, throw in Haloscan comments, provide email feeds through FeedBlitz, do tracebacks, pingbacks, and most importantly, join a like-minded blogging posse by setting up a prominent blogroll. The perils of blogroll politics have been explored elsewhere, and here I want to just note down (perhaps mostly for my own later reference, since I am no blogging expert) some ways to maintain your blogroll.

If you are running your own server and use some popular blogging tool like b2evolution or WordPress, you can use their built-in blogroll (or linkblog) capabilities to maintain your set of links to sites your recommend. Popular blog hosts like Blogger and WordPress provide such capabilities too. If you find these things limiting (Blogger, last time I checked required text editing to create a blogroll, and a non-hierarchical non-tagged one at that), there are a few other esoteric techniques: host a blogroll/link-collection elesewhere, and use supplied (by the hosting site) JavaScript or XML-RPC to post your link updates to your site.

• Blogroll servers

Services like Blogrolling.com can be used to maintain your blogroll which using HTML/JavaScript can be imported into a section of your blog.

• Social Bookmarking

A blogroll is not much different from the old bookmarks idea, and social bookmarking (made popular by del.icio.us) sites may be one interesting way to maintain your links. Many of these sites provide JavaScript and/or XML-RPC mechanisms to bring your roll into your blog. I particularly like Jots and Blogmarks both of which can post your entries at their site to your blog using XML-RPC or other means. Both services are Blogger/WordPress/Typepad/etc aware. Most interestingly, both provide (similar to del.icio.us, which also supports such export) tagging of links. As is standard these days, they also provide bookmarklets which you can add to your browser to quick link/add pages. As far as I can tell, one problem many of these sites face is that they do not provide a way to do multiple tag (logical AND) searches (for that feature, try Scuttle). Another thing to note is that most of these servers post to your blog (as blog entries) and not to the blogroll within your blog. This may be unsatisfactory.

I use Jots to maintain my links and have it post update as blog entries to the blog category: Bookmarks. Additionally, I provide a link in my Blogroll called Bookmarks pointing to my Jots page. This works fine for me since I am conflating blogrolling with bookmarking. YMMV.

• Online RSS Aggregators

Yet another option is to use an online aggregator like Bloglines, which you are probably already using to read RSS feeds, and let it export [part of] your feeds list as a blogroll using one of the techniques above.

This is a very cursory sketch of my investigation into the available services, and I hope to flesh it out from my notes when I have additional time.

Also see: Roxomatic provides a great comparison of social bookmarking sites.