Comments on: Blog Spring Clean Checklist

By: Will You Reboot on May 1st?: ProBlogger Blog Tips

Will You Reboot on May 1st?: ProBlogger Blog Tips — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 01:38:12 +0000

[...] Every spring, folks head out to their lawn sheds or garages and start rummaging through stuff. They toss what they don’t need and keep what they want. They start cultivating the lawn, trimming weeds, pruning the rose bushes and washing the sidewalks (or is that only my father-in-law that washes his sidewalks?! ;)) You usually know when it’s spring cleaning time as the pickup trucks hauling trash start queuing up at the county dump. In the same way, blogs tend to collect rubbish in the form of broken links, file downloads that are no longer needed, or if you’ve moved between hosts one or more time in the past year, possible messed up text (usually because character set settings are different between settings or blog platforms). Setting aside an annual Reboot day, like Darren does at the beginning of the year, puts you into a cleanup and dispose mode that only helps to keep your site lean and trim and served up well for Google. [...]

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:50:39 +0000

I’ve done this recently, although instead of removing the “subscribe with..” buttons, I converted them to text links.

By: » The Tlog

» The Tlog — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:31:19 +0000

[...] In cre8d design, there’s a Blog Cleanup Checklist (link first seen on ProBlogger), listing some things you can do to “clean up” your blog. Most of the potential problems the tips check for are mentioned in one or more parts of my Blogging Tips series, but it’s nice to have quick ways of checking for them. [...]

By: mark

mark — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 05:37:12 +0000

yup, those are awesome tips indeed. always need to clean up junk :D

By: Michele

Michele — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 21:30:22 +0000

I’m sure it’s a _lot_ cleaner as a result :)

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 21:27:42 +0000

Do ya think? :)

By: Michele

Michele — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 20:19:10 +0000

Aaron – a bit extreme :)

By: Aaron

Aaron — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 19:46:45 +0000

I just accidentally deleted all my plugins and that seems to have fixed my problem. LOL

By: Michele

Michele — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 19:14:34 +0000

Darren

It’s very easy to get carried away with plugins, widgets and the like. I removed all the silly “subscribe” buttons a few months ago and gained a lot of screen real estate. Upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress made me reassess which plugins I was actively using and which ones were just geeky clutter!

Michele

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 17:42:21 +0000

Hey Darren,

Since you’re spring cleaning, maybe you would like to fix the code that overruns your post body.

I noticed it after you put the Six Figure Blogging button in the sidebar.

Only a suggestion from an amature.

Joe

By: amtsleiter

amtsleiter — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:38:26 +0000

Yep…i already did this a few day ago. Switched to a new design and a clutterfree frontpage. The most important and most prominent item on your homepage is the content. Not polls, buttons, recent comments etc….

I think many users are overwhelmed with the amount of information provided on many frontpages. I moved recent comments, polls, archives and favorite articles to a separate page. Regular readers with real interest in those information will still be able to get them.