Sunday, June 10, 2007

What is on your Blogger Wish List?

If you could improve Blogger in any one area, what would it be? I have a few ideas on that subject and it appears that Blogger does also.

Blogger Wishlist form optionsThe Blogger Wish List page asks us to vote on a feature suggestion. How they came up with the six suggestions on this list, I do not know. But I have seen some of them harped about in zillions of comments spread across many posts.

Of the six suggestions, I really have a passion for two of them. I also have suggestions for what is obviously absent. Could it be that by the omission of certain discussions might suggest that they are not entertaining them? That I do not know either.


No. 1 - I want to show excerpts of my posts, with links to the full text.
This is, and should be, top priority for Blogger.

The use of the so-called "peekaboo posts" hack is only a band-aid. While the hack may hide the remainder of the post from the viewer, it does not hide it from a spider or readers who have javascript disabled. All elements of your Main or Archive page, including images and embedded objects, will still be loaded whether or not the reader wishes them to.

True excerpts will be "what you see, is all you get". Excerpts will cut down on duplicate content -- and thereby reducing the amount of Supplemental Pages in the Google index. This is a win-win for both Blogger and Google Search.

No. 2 - I want to be able to upload other files to my blog besides images.
Other files? That would be nice. How about CSS style sheets (.css), javascript repositories (.js) and Html pages (.html).

Imagine unloading all of the styles and javascript from the template/layout and moving them into linked files. This will go a long way to reduce page sizes which are seriously bloated as it is. There are methods of accomplishing this by using external sources such as Google Pages or your own web server. But why should we have to?

The other four items on the list did not interest me much. The item for Recommending a Blog of Note for instance, who actually cares? I do not frequent the pages that they are "noted" on.

Or suggest a new feature
This was a no-brainer. I had two.

  • Provide a setting to Enable/Disable the Nofollow attribute in Comments.
  • Provide for "in-post" comment forms
I think it goes without saying that these are probably on the top of everbody's list. Do you have any others to add?

Vote now and get noticed
Vote now. It is easy to do and will only take you a couple of seconds.

Spread the word about the Wish List and let's see if we can get them to notice. It is worth a shot. I will be stickying this post to my sidebar in plain view in the hope that others will notice.

If you create a new post with your vote(s)and/or suggestions and link to this post, I will notice it. I will link back to your voting post by listing it here. Alternatively, you could drop me a comment below and let me know how you voted.

And yes, I voted for more than one suggestion too! =)

I hope nobody sees that =) above and suggests smilies. Yuck!


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17 comments :

Unknown said...

great job!!!!!

i will make a post and link to you blog later..hehehe...

Anonymous said...

Thanx Nuaim. Coming from another Blogspot Tip site makes it even greater.

BTW, noticed your blogroll and returned it in kind.

Kathleen said...

I didn't know about this poll, thanks for letting me know. However I must disagree with you on your number one choice. I hate blogs where I have to click on a link to read the rest of the post. My computer and internet loads slowly so to have to keep loading pages, takes forever. It's so much better to just be able to scroll down the page to read all posts.

It's the same with those whose feeds are partial. I only use google reader for those website that load so slowly that it practically freezes my computer. Having to click to go to their website and read more of their post defeats the purpose.

Finally, I like your blog and will be featuring it this Monday on my Callista's Ramblings blog.

Anonymous said...

I don't use blogspot for some of these very reasons - it's just not flexible enough. I use Wordpress, but if installing wordpress is too much trouble, adding these features to Blogspot would make it a good alternative. I don't get why they are asking for votes. Why not just add all the options? :-P

Anonymous said...

If I could choose anything, I'd allow for image tags/categories - so you can create icons for different subjects or issues. For example, every time I make a post about smoking, it inserts a smoking icon.

Anonymous said...

It is possible to have the full "read more" effect just by hacking the template. I've done this with another foreign language blog (Zamolxis). I will do it soon on my other blogs as well, though I'm pondering whether to install a brand new template altogether.
I would've added your blog to the WeFollow feed, but it seems that the "nofollow" tags have not been removed.
Thanx for the heads-up re: blogger survey, didn't know about it. Nobody did, it seems :)

Anonymous said...

@Consumed Consumer - Yes, I know it is possible to hack the template into showing just a snippet of the post. The truth is that it is only hidden. The full text can be seen when you view the source.

As for this blog being DoFollow, and I get this a lot, it has NoFollow removed from the Author Link. Your link for Consumed Consumer is a DoFollow link.

ib said...

Mea culpa! You're right on both counts, so I added you. :)

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed browsing over the Blogger Wish List. I completely agree with your number one due to the win-win side of it! Great post!

Texasholly said...

Good list. My most hated aspect of blogger is that most the people that comment do not have contact information. I hate not being able to contact them directly.

I appreciate the information on the no follow stuff and will be working on that soon.

Anonymous said...

@HRH - yeah. maybe having a required email entry for Name/URL commetators would be nice too.

Anonymous said...

Very good suggestion! Especially the first one. I have voted for it and hopefully it will be implemented.

Anonymous said...

I'd like an option to display comments from last to first, instead of first to last.

Anonymous said...

I would like the feature to upload other files than images to blogger as every body wants this bcz googlepages have been closed by google..

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the article!

I add "Display my posts in reverse, or non-chronological order".

But I really want them to backup sidebar elements - at least when you Export your blog!

All the Best!
Svet and Kyle

Anonymous said...

I'd like to have my sidebar background a different color choice from the main posting area. Also, I've never been able to figure out how to activate Links at the bottom of my posts. Everything is turned on in Settings, but the words "link to this post" just doesn't appear.

Anonymous said...

I would like to modidy robots.txt in order to avoid content duplication.