Well look who is guilty of a subject they are about to write about? Yeah I know, it is me. I am going to set a new plan of attack for my blogs and set it up so that each day I focus on 1 or 2 of them, and then the next day another 1 or 2. This way I have a plan of attack instead of just a "when ever the thought arises" mentality.

Posting on a regular basis is very helpful to any blog. Back in 2000 when I first started blogging, it was very important for everyone to post something almost 3-4 times a day. Of course back then we didn't realize the harmful nature of posting specific details of our lives and it made it quiet easy to post things.

Some of the better blogs I read have a schedule for when they post. One blog in particular updates every Thursday. The author spends about a week putting together an entire page of content and then releases it all on Thursday. The advantage to this is it gives your blog more of a magazine type feel to it. People know when to come look at the site, rather than randomly looking.

So with that in mind, I am going to set a schedule for posting to these blogs again. Let us hope that this works just as well for me, as it does for other people.

Back in the day there wasn't an easy way to give your posts a title. Now today it is very easy to do. Most of the blogging software comes with a field for the title. Some of them are optional and that brings us to this post. Should you title your posts?

For the most part the answer is yes. Actually every time should be a yes. Sure it might be hard to come up with a title, but it helps with everything from search engines to giving your readers an idea of what you are going to talk about to creating dynamic urls, it is always a good idea.

The main reason I like titles is it helps your readers to know what you are talking about. Say you have a running thought process that is scattered between posts. If you title the first one "Thoughts on a red balloon" and then the second one "More thoughts on a red balloon" and then the third "Thoughts on a red balloon part 3" your readers will know to read them in order. And since most people post their posts in a reverse chronological order, it will help them to find the other posts.

A lot of blogs allow comments. Back when blogging first started getting big, comments were all the rage. But then something inevitable happened. Comment spam. Since then people have been coming up with all kinds of ways to prevent comment spam from happening. These methods include black lists, all comments to be approved, text verifiers and more.

So with people always figuring out ways around the blocking of comments are they worth it? Some sites I would say yes. Other sites I would say no. Do I really want comments on this blog? No. Thus I don't have them. This blog is about me sharing my information with you about how to make your blog better. Not me and some other random person who wants to get into a flame war with me in comments explaining blogging to you.

Other sites where there is a community feel to it, comments are needed. Sites like digg would be worthless without comments. They are what make digg, digg. But they also have a great system in place for moderating all the comments.

The other issue, as hinted above, is do you want to really track all your comments? How involved do you get with your comments? I once read a blog where the comments were way more interesting than the actual posts. People would question and respond to the post within the comments and the discussion the followed was much better than that of the post.

But most people won't respond in their comments and if they do, it is never to the amount that people want them to. So you have to ask yourself if you want the hassle of managing your comments or not. If so, then go for it.

One of the things I really hate when I review blogs is that I see the same template over and over again. This was really bad about four years ago when Blogger only provided about six templates and for some unknown reason a lot of people picked this horribly ugly template. Thankfully today Blogger has a lot of good templates to chose from, the only problem is that people use them as is.

Even if you can't design your own site, you can at least find a better template. Sites like Open Source Web Design make this very easy to do. Adding the Blogger code to a template is not hard, and if you have any readers you can always ask.

I like the idea of customizing a template for a site. Sure there are only so many ways you can make a two column layout but color, images, gradients, all play a role in how your site looks. Imagine for a second you are showing your house. Would you leave all of your stuff out? No you would clean up. Now imagine if you lived in a development where almost all houses were built off the same blueprint. Which house do you think sells for more money and quicker? Correct. The house that has the most customizations done.

People don't like ugly designs. Nor do they like repeats of designs. So take the time and customize your template. It will make a world of difference.

Many people when they start a blog do not give it their full attention and thought. Most bloggers when then start out will post some seriously stupid things and all it does is hurt them. Below is a list of things not to do.

1. Posting your full name.
People like to post their full name on line. They think it will help give them more credibility. Maybe it comes from the thought of a newspaper by line. Who knows. I am not sure why people do it, but they do it all the time. All it does is help make someone else find you easier when they google your name for a job.

2. Posting information about your work.
Co-workers love to gossip and find dirt on other co-workers. It has always been this way. Just now, it is a lot easier for someone to find something bad about you. Google is your own worst enemy. I had a friend who posted about a co-worker on his blog. He didn't say anything mean, just some random facts about this person's habits in the office. My friend got in trouble for it.

3. Posting about illegal activity.
This is just a no brainer. Do not under any circumstances post that you were smoking pot, doing drugs, drinking under age, getting into fights or anything else that is against the law. Again, future employers will find this.

4. Posting pictures of yourself in compromising positions.
Unless that is what your site is about, I don't recommend doing this. Think back to Antonella Barba in this years American Idol. Pictures were taken, pictures were then posted after she become famous. Just don't do it.

5. Posting about mundane things.
No one likes to read "8am Woke up. 8:15 Went to the bathroom. 8:20 Made breakfast..." Don't think that you have to tell everyone every thing you do. Just because you write a daily blog doesn't mean you have to make it a daily blog.

I know these seem like obvious things to avoid doing, but all to often I see people do them. They are easy to stay away from so please do it. It will help you out in the long run. Remember just because you posted it and forgot about in 2002, doesn't mean Google or any other search engine forgot about it too.

A lot of blogs tend to be of the "personal" type. These are along the lines of daily updates and that sort of thing. Other blogs, like this one, have a focus. Deviating from this focus would be detrimental to the blog's growth. There are times when you can get away with it, but early on, you want to make sure you are keeping your focus.

Imagine if after a month or so of reading this blog you stumble across a post about how to play No Limit Texas Holdem. Clearly this is not the right spot for a poker related post as the goal here is to improve your blog. What purpose does a poker post serve here? Nothing really.

Another reason to keep your focus is that certain keywords will keep coming up. Probably in the case of this blog, the word "blog" will pop up a lot. Now the word blog is a pretty generic term and there are litterally millions of hits on Google for the word blog. But Google is smart and they know when a site is about a topic. So if after a year or so of me keeping this site going, searching Google for the word blog, might return this site.

The other reason to keep a focus is for getting other people to link back to you. Say you have a blog about cruises. This blog covers everything from what ships to sail, where to sail, what to do on the boat, excursions, photos and more. Now where would you want to find a link back to your site? On another cruise site? Yes. On a vacation site? Yes. On a site devoted to hockey? Nope. Just something to keep in mind.

There are few things I harp on when it comes to blogging. Most of the obvious things (spelling, readability, etc) are obvious to everyone else. One thing that is not obvious to most people however are archives.

Since blogging took off in 2000, thanks mostly to the popularity of Blogger skyrocketing, archives have been around. Blogger has always presented archives in the following manner:
Display a list of the months with a year and then on that page display all the posts for that month. We will get to why I prefer this method the best later on.

Other sites have gone their own route with how archives should be presented. Some sites just list each post in a numerical order. Other sites use an "older posts" link on the front page. And other sites use variations on the calendar method. I will explain each of these, and why they are all bad.

Lets start off with the absolute worst idea ever for displaying archives - the calendar method. This method puts a small calendar on the site listing all of the days of the month. Days that have a post are typically in bold and are clickable. While this seems like a great idea, it isn't. Because what if you want to go to a different month? Well then you click the little arrow left or right and switch to that month. But what if the site has been around for a while and has over 2 years worth of archives? See the problem? No?

Ok what is so bad about this is that as of writing this, the date is May of 2007. Now imagine if I wanted to find the very first post. I don't know how long the site has been around, nor do I know the day it was created. Sure I could look up a domain registration, but that doesn't always work. So lets say that the first post happened on February 3rd, 2004. Now I would have to cycle through all the months to get to February of 04 and then click on the date. See the time involved? Blogging is about reading, not about clicking your way through.

The next worst culprit is the page of "every single post" listed in some way. Typically this list is sorted by date written in a descending order (meaning today is at the top, first post ever at the bottom). Other times it is the other way around. And sometimes, you will see the posts listed alphabetically. Alphabetically is only helpful if you remember that the post had a title of say "Raising money for softball". But even if the posts are listed by date, it is still a pain to always click the back button after reading each post. I guess you could open each link in a new tab, but blogs read like books. They all have a flow. Interrupting this flow is not a good thing.

The one archive system which isn't too bad compared to the previous two is the "older posts" link at the bottom of a page. Typically an author will have 10-20 posts on one page and then when you click this older posts link it takes you to the next 10-20 posts. The downside to this is that what if you want to go to a specific date? It is kind of hard to do that when you are only getting 10 posts per page and you don't even know where it is as far as previous posts is concerned.

Which leads me to the best method. Having a link for a month/year and then that page containing every post. This makes it very easy to find a specific post and locate the beginning of a blog. Say a blog has a football theme to it and you are curious about this person's thoughts on the game that happened in the 3rd week of September. Easy, just go to September and then scroll down till you find the post about that game.

One thing I will also mention is that as an added bonus to the monthly archives you should have individual page archives. Sure you could have anchor links within the month and be able to link directly to that post, but individual pages are a great thing for Google. They will help your site get noticed faster, and then if you have an important post that gets digged, it will be a direct link.

Content Smatter was originally supposed to be a blog/article site about the contents of your blog. But then that didn't really work out the way I had hoped to when I first opened Content Smatter. So I morphed it into a directory of all the blogs that were at The Weblog Review and allowed people to add their own.

Unfortunately the directory turned into a total bust. Spam sites became very popular with Content Smatter. Every day hundreds of people would submit their site and since there was no approval process, their site was auto listed.

Life kind of hit a snag and I stopped posting to The Weblog Review. But recently things have picked up and I am reviewing sites again. In my first week back I have seen numerous errors when it comes to blogging. And I have posted about these errors in the reviews. However I remembered I had this little site which was supposed to help people improve their blogging.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not a writer at all. I do not have an English major and I didn't study to become a journalist or an author or anything that actually me writing down words in the English language. I am a web developer who just happens to blog and loves all things blog related. So from time to time, there will be a new article on here explaining how to improve your blog.