Don’t Let The Bond Between You and Your Blog Break!

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The moment you pressed the ‘CREATE!’ button for your blog, you created a fragile bond between your blog and yourself. It’s so fragile at the moment that even the lightest of bad things can break it. But then you build it up and make it stronger by taking good care of your blog.

It’s a bond of friendship and love, just like there’s a bond between you and your wife/husband, your children, your friends, your parents, etc. You love them all and that’s the reason there’s a strong bond between you and them. Don’t you also love your blog? That’s the reason you created it in the first place, right? So, shouldn’t there be a strong bond of love and affection between you and your blog too?

Image: ktylerconk

You strengthen that bond by taking care of your blog and fulfilling its needs and demands. But if you don’t take care of your blog and don’t attend to it, you damage that fragile bond, making it weaker and weaker. And then comes the time when it goes ’snap!’. The bond’s broken and so is your blog. You lose interest in your blog and leave it to die a painful death…

Your blog is like your child. You take good care of your children and provide them with what they need and give them love. Don’t you? You thus

if you want to develop a strong bond of love with your blog, you’ll have to treat it like a real living-and-breathing human being.

strengthen the bond of love and affection that you have with your children. You should do the same with your blog. Make that bond strong and capable of surviving any disaster(such as blogger’s block).

So, how do you make sure that bond remains there and becomes stronger and stronger? Here are a few tips:

Keep It Updated

This is the most important and hardest-to-follow tip. You have to keep your blog updated with new posts. If you don’t update your blog, it’ll soon become a barren land, with no vegetation or habitation of any sort. Regular updates will give life to your blog and will make it a thriving and fast growing place. It’s just like a plant. If you don’t water it, it’ll wilt and die soon. But if you water it regularly, it will grow fast and will thrive. By regularly updating your blog, you add to the bond between you and your blog and make it stronger. Your blog begins to appreciate and acknowledge the amount of attention you give to it and you get a lot of benefits, like readers for your content, for example.

Clean it Up

Do you like to visit a house which is untidy? Do you like to keep your house untidy? Just like that, you must keep your blog neat and clean and all tidied up. Strip all those fancy blog buttons and banners declaring you to be part of so and so blog directories. It’s OK to keep a few, but don’t over do it. Don’t cram too much stuff into your sidebar. For example, blog-roll links don’t necessarily have to go in your sidebar; send

them to the footer. The above-the-fold section of your blog is the most important to focus on when cleaning up because this is the area of your blog where the visitor looks first. This must be absolutely spick and span. Don’t cram too many links into your header navigation, some of them can go into the footer. (NOTE: This also helps in optimizing reader experience.)

When you do all this, you reduce the amount of things that are displayed on your blog. As a result the size of your pages goes down considerably, thus reducing the load on your blog’s server and the download time. Your blog couldn’t thank you enough!

NOTE: A good benchmark to judge your blog’s ‘cleanliness’ is to look at it like an absolute stranger-reader. Do you like the looks of that completely-new-to-you( ) blog?

The next thing to clean up after you’ve cleaned up your blog’s looks is the code. The code is the back-end of your blog. Even the smallest of discrepancies in your code can bring your whole blog down to its knees. Therefore it makes absolute sense to optimize the code. Check the template files(the basic files) of your blog for any coding errors such as a missing ending </div> or </script> tag. Any errors in your template file will be repeated all over the blog, and therefore it is very important to check the template files for any errors. Remember, it’s worth the effort. Also, check your style sheet file and delete unnecessary stuff such as repeated properties for the same thing, multiple instances of the same thing, empty selectors, etc. This will drastically reduce the size of your style sheet file.



The above two things(the looks plus the code) combined optimized will be a great step towards strengthening the relationship between you and your blog. You show affection and care for your blog and your in turn your blog brings out its best for all to see. Wouldn’t that give a great feeling to you that you helped make your blog’s life a whole lot less like hell?

Take It Easy

Don’t bombard your blog with posts. In other words, adopt a relaxed posting frequency. This way, you’ll be able to give your self and your blog some rest. Imagine this: if you keep someone working continuously for hours and hours at end, don’t you think that person will break down at some time? The same is with your blog. Now your blog isn’t exactly a living and breathing human, but if you want to develop a strong bond of love with your blog, you’ll have to treat it like a real living-and-breathing human being.

Do YOU have any good tips that you use or suggest to strengthen the bond between you and your blog? Please let us know!

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