Entries Tagged 'browser' ↓

If you have a blog, it’s bound to happen to you sooner or later…

The symptoms: Maybe your blog won’t come up in your own browser. Or maybe it looks fine in your browser, but not in someone else’s. You get a discreet (or not-so-discreet) message that there’s a problem. Somebody’s complaining about a 404, an hourglass, a browser crash, a blank window that says “Done,” a partial display, or a scrambled mess that they can scarcely describe.

You gotta fix it promptly! It could be a problem with your layout or content. It could be a problem with the hosting provider. Or it could be a hacker or spammer interfering with delivery of your blog. Whatever the problem, it’s up to you to do something about it. If you have a blog and you want to maintain your credibility, your readers expect your blog to come up promptly when they want to see it. They expect it to display attractively in all of the commonly-used Internet browsers. If your blog loads slowly and displays poorly, it reflects badly on your ability to maintain your blog. If your blog is down too frequently or for too long a time, your readership will disappear because visitors will think you’ve stopped blogging entirely!

Learn from other bloggers’ war stories!

Problems fall into certain general categories. Even though every blog troubleshooting scenario may look different at first glance, you can learn to spot the symptoms of common problems that are easy to fix. As a general rule, the more troubleshooting “war stories” from other bloggers you read about or listen to, the more problems you will be able to solve, and the more pitfalls you will be able to avoid on your own.

Here’s what I did:

In this case, 1389 Blog – Antijihadist Tech was displaying, but the format was scrambled. I found out about this problem when I got a direct message from a fellow Twitterer, ThomAllen, telling me that my blog wasn’t loading properly. I immediately checked it out in IE7 and the mobile web interface, but everything showed up just fine. My Feedburner output looked good also.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help! I asked other people on Twitter, and on an open thread in another blog, to view this blog in their own browsers, and to let me know which browsers they had used and what errors they saw (if any). I got a considerable number of responses. Thanks, everyone!

Pinpoint the problem. After reviewing the responses, I could see that the blog worked fine in IE6, IE7, mobile Mozilla 4, and Safari. But in Firefox, the main content in the center column was pushed to the bottom of the blog, below the final element in the left sidebar. Some people also warned that it took a long time to load.

Reproduce the problem on your own computer, if you can. Other Twitterers urged me to go ahead and install Mozilla Firefox 2 on my machine and use it to view the blog. I did exactly that, and was able to duplicate the problem that I had been told about.

Look at docs, man pages, wikis, forums, and whatever else is available. Because this is a WordPress blog, I looked up the problem in the WordPress codex, the WP Designer forum, and other WordPress forums and docs. Turns out that some browsers are pickier than others about how they handle issues with padding and elements that don’t quite fit in the allotted space.

What has changed recently? I remembered that I had made some adjustments to the sidebar size and padding in my WordPress layout to accommodate some petition widget code that was just a bit too wide to fit into the left sidebar. Hmmm, I thought, this isn’t working the way I thought it would!

Back out recent changes to get to a version that works, and rebuild from there. I started by reloading the original theme files for Cutline 3-Column Split. I created a WordPress page for Petitions and moved the petition boxes into it. To cut back on the load time and reduce visual complexity, I also decided to move the IT and Computing Links and the Mobile Web Links into separate WordPress pages also. Links to all of the blog’s pages are prominently displayed under the Pages header in the sidebar (see Resources).

So what are the take-home lessons here?

1. If you notice that someone else’s blog isn’t displaying correctly, don’t automatically assume that the blog owner is already aware of the problem. Maybe not! You can help by sending an email or other message indicating what browser you are using, and describing exactly what happened (or failed to happen).
2. On a regular basis, look at your own blog in several different browsers, including the mobile web interface if you have one. Be sure to view the blog before you have signed on as a blog admin. In addition, check your feed output and any other features that involve user interaction, such as polls and response forms.
3. It is not worthwhile to hack or tweak your blog template just to squeeze an odd-sized widget or graphic into a sidebar or other page element. You’ll end up with a lopsided theme that might not load properly. It’s better to find an entirely different place to display that item. And if you do any WP theme-hacking, be sure to test your new or modified theme in as many browsers as you can before releasing it for use in anyone’s blog!
4. Track your stats and check them often. It’s a good idea to use several tracking tools. For example, Google Analytics gives you a breakdown of visitors by browser type as well as by referrer (i.e., the site that the visitor came from). If visitor counts, and time spent on your blog, decline for a particular type of browser, that may mean that your blog performs poorly for that browser. If you stop getting traffic from a certain referrer, perhaps you are being blocked in some way. Other utilities, such as Google Webmaster Tools, can tell you whether search engine spiders are able to index your site’s pages so that the public can find you.

Also see:

• Why Bloggers Need to Ping
• Twitter 101
• Resources

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Blog traffic statistics tell quite a tale!

After all of the endless hype surrounding Digg, I was surprised to read this article by Darren Rowse at Problogger: Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic than Digg.

Hmmm, I thought, time to try it out! So, after finding out that StumbleUpon doesn’t accept an all-numeric user ID, I signed up as 1389AD. I set up the little toolbar and started using it.

Then, I ran across an article that came out a few months ago, but is still very much worth reading, so I used the toolbar to submit a review of the article on StumbleUpon: My Thoughts on Our Children’s Children’s War.

I was surprised at what happened next, and you probably will be too.

Read all about it here: How to Bury Digg.com.

Updated 12/1/2007:
Were you looking for information about Digg’s owners and investors?

We have that too! Click on…

Why Conservatives Need to Geek-Up (Part 3)

Updated 12/20/2007:
Learn how to make StumbleUpon work for you!

• UnOfficial Stumbleupon Guide
• Social Networks: Why StumbleUpon Rules Them All
• StumbleUpon vs Digg Experiment
• Pwned: StumbleUpon Digg initial results

Stumble This Article!

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“Why would I want to do that? I haven’t forgotten what I wrote last week. Besides, I’m busy. It’s time for me to get out the next blog post!”

Do you know how well your blog is working?

There’s no substitute for bringing up your own blog in your own browser and taking a good look at it on a regular basis. It’s even better if you also view it on other platforms and browsers. If your blog has a mobile web interface, be sure to set up the proper environment to check that too.

Here’s what you can learn by putting yourself in your readers’ shoes:

• Does your blog actually display? Don’t laugh. I’ve looked at a lot of blogs lately, or tried to look at them. I was surprised by what I found.Your blog may be among the many that won’t even come up at all.

  How do you know it’s running if you haven’t tested it recently? If you’re serious about blogging, you won’t want readers to find that your blog is down. If that happens too many times, readers will stop visiting because they think your blog is defunct. Worse yet, other bloggers and webmasters will stop linking to it.

  You can’t just assume that your hosting provider and your blog publishing system are making your content available, unless you monitor your blog regularly.

  • Does the entire main page load up on the first try? Or does the loading process stop before the page is complete, leaving you with pictures or text that are cut off in the middle or missing entirely?
  • Does the initial page provide everything that the reader needs to begin navigating, including excerpts or full text from one or more recent blog posts?
  • When you click on the URL for an individual blog post, does the entire page become visible, including comments?
  • Are your outbound links working? Check your recent blog posts. Click on outbound links individually or run a utility. If a link is dead, either fill in the updated URL, or delete the link entirely.
• Is all of your text legible? If you want people to make a habit of reading your text, give them an unrestricted view, and don’t give them eyestrain and headaches.
  • Is any of your text hidden behind misaligned widgets, add-ons, photos, or other text elements?
  • Is there too little contrast between the text and the background?
  • Is your background so loud or busy, or your layout so cluttered, that readers have a trouble focusing on your text?
• Does your blog take too long to load? Remember, people may be browsing from anywhere in the world, sometimes from mobile devices. They don’t all have as much RAM as you do on your desktop. They don’t all have broadband connections with unlimited access at no additional charge.So don’t try to make them drink from a fire hose. Their connections will time out, their browsers will crash, they may incur extra charges. Many readers will give up and never come back.

  If you want those readers to stay, make it easier for them.

  • Limit the total size of blog posts, text, and graphics that appear on your home page, and on each subsequent page.
  • Break the data stream into chunks and let each reader decide what to see next.
  • Don’t cram your last fifty blog posts onto one display. These endless vertical scrolls hog system memory and run at a snail’s pace. All too often, the text at the end is cut off. Readers hate that. Instead, display full-text blog posts individually or in small groups.
  • Don’t post high-resolution graphics directly on the page. Let your readers click on a thumbnail view when they’re ready to display or download a large photo or chart.
  • Don’t autoload music or videos. Readers are always complaining about websites or blogs that monopolize their bandwidth, make unexpected noises that disturb others, or launch some sort of multimedia extravaganza without asking. Let readers decide by clicking on a link when they are ready to see the next set of blog posts, watch a video, or play music.

  Does your blog offer an RSS or Atom feed? There are many advantages to offering a feed, so you certainly should set up that feature if you haven’t already.

  • Subscribe to your own RSS or Atom feed. That way, you can be sure that it comes out promptly and is formatted correctly.
  • Use full feeds, not just headlines or excerpts. Don’t frustrate users by making them wait for something else to load in order to finish reading your article. Also, some search engines use your feed to index your blog, so it’s to your advantage to provide the complete text.
• Are readers leaving comments on your blog? If they do, be sure to pay attention. You may even find some good ideas in the comments for this blog post!

The bottom line: Review your blog regularly to make sure it’s functional and user-friendly, and you’ll be sure to attract and keep far more readers.

Stumble It!

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mobile web
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Cnet News.com warns us that:

Popular add-ons to Firefox are the latest criminal attack vector

Many people have switched to the Mozilla Firefox browser because of Internet Explorer’s known vulnerabilities to malware. But as more people begin to use a browser, it becomes a larger potential target for malware, and authors of worms, spyware, spambots, and so forth will probe for ways to attack it. They’ve found that vulnerability in the download procedure for Firefox add-ins, whenever the download is coming from an unsecured server.

Here’s a summary of what to do to avoid the problem:

• If you have a wireless home router, make sure that you have set your password to something other than the default.
• Download an add-on only if it is hosted on a secure server; i.e., a server that uses the SSL “https” protocol. Safe add-ons are listed on Mozilla’s official Firefox add-on page.
• Your existing add-ons may automatically reconnect with their host to check for updates. This is safe only if those updates will be downloaded from a secure server. Disable any existing add-ons unless you are sure that you originally downloaded them from a secure server.

Techies can find more details about the Firefox vulnerability, including an FAQ, on Slight Paranoia, Christopher Soghoian’s blog:

A Remote Vulnerability in Firefox Extensions

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