Less than a year after I started Bad Language, it’s still a surprise to me that a) it’s been as successful as it has been and b) people now ask me for advice about starting a blog. Equally, nobody told me the whole thing would be so much fun.

Anyhow, I was asked again for some tips by someone starting a blog and I thought the most appropriate response was a blog post.

So this is a list of what has worked for me. Your mileage may differ.

1. Write often. I try (*try*) to write every week day. It doesn’t always happen because of work pressure but it is easier to maintain the discipline if it is regular. I like using Joe’s Goals to track this. Traffic seems to drop off dramatically at weekends so I don’t post then, although I sometimes run a ‘links list’ style post on Saturdays but it’s mainly things I’ve collected during the week.
2. Keep a scratchpad. I use the notes field in an Outlook task item for each of the blogs I write to capture links, ideas, to-do items and so on. When I actually sit down to write, I’ve usually got two or three ideas to hand and a bunch of links to explore. It’s useful to have a few stub posts ready to expand or edit in case you don’t have time to write a long piece.
3. Have a time to write. I tend to blog first thing in the morning, usually around 6am. That’s just me. (See my post on how to get up early.) I know other people who write after work or in their lunchbreak.
4. Variety is the spice of life. I prefer to do posts of different lengths and styles. The ‘how to’ list is popular but I like to run longer, more formal articles and interviews as well as more personal observations. One of the pleasures of the blog is that I don’t have an editor who tells me what to write or how to write it. To this extent it is a playground for me.
5. Contribute to the conversation. There are an awful lot of sheep on the Internet. With nearly 60 million blogs in existence,you really want to try and be a sheepdog. In my opinion, it’s important to say something new and something interesting to contribute that the conversation.
6. Be yourself. Voltaire once said, “if we don’t find anything good a least will find something new.” Ideally you want to say something interesting, Just be yourself. Some of the best blogs are the ones that are unique, idiosyncratic, and highly personal. The extraordinary thing about the blogosphere is that whatever you write about, there is an audience for it.
7. Show your face. I think it’s good to put a picture of yourself,your e-mail address, and a little bit of biographical information about yourself on your blog. Sometimes a nom-de-plume is necessary but turn your blogging alter ego into a ‘real’ person too. One of the interesting things about the lonelygirl15 story was how accepting fans were when they realised that Bree was, in fact, an actress.
8. Get the technology right. If you’re serious about blogging, you need to have a proper website address and not one from a free blogging company. I use WordPress software. A Google search will list all kinds of companies that specialise in blog hosting. Once you get your site setup, you need things like spam filtering (I have had 15,000 comment spams since starting this site) and other add-ons. A good site design will help but there are lots of open source designs to get you started. Finally, I recommend using dedicated software to write posts rather than the blogging software’s built-in editor. In my case, I use Microsoft Live Writer.
9. Plug into the blogosphere. The easiest way to build traffic is to comment appropriately on other people’s sites. The blogosphere is a reciprocal sort of place. Link their blogs and they might read and link to yours. Critical to all this is a good newsreader and a good selection of sites. I use NewsGator because I can access my feed list on any web browser, on my PDA and on my main work computer and they are always synchonised. Make sure your site is registered with Technorati.
10. Linking and loving. I’ve always been impressed by people who email me nicely when I comment on their blogs. I wish I could find the time to do it - I try. Surprisingly, the blogs that I am ‘closest’ to in terms of mutual sympathy and mutual linking are also the ones who are, on the face of it, my ‘competitors.’ They write about the same stuff I write about. Actually, though there’s no real competition and finding your online community is a good way to start building a reader base.
11. Traffic is important but regular readers rule. Occasionally, you’ll produce a post that goes ballistic. I’ve had 20,000 visitors a day on occasion. Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Slashdot, Del.icio.us and all the others pick it up and you’re away. Only a fraction of those people stay and subscribe. It’s very exciting when it happens but what matters is the number of people who keep coming back, who comment, who link to your site and who enjoy what you write. Write for yourself first, then write for them. The harder I try to get a traffic monster, the more elusive it becomes so I sort of forget about trying and they keep happening.
12. Don’t forget search. Google is my number one source of incoming visitors. Remember to register your site with all the usual search engines. I use Google Analytics and Google Sitemaps to monitor what they are searching for and tweak headlines and content a little to make sure I’m delivering content that searchers want. Advice on interviews is very popular.
13. Use pictures. Pictures, cartoons and illustrations are essential. Just imagine reading your favourite magazine if there were no pictures. Yuck! A good picture illustrates the point you are making and draws in readers. I like iStockPhoto which is a cheap source of good quality images but they can be a bit corporate.
14. Write for the screen. Be conscious of how people read on computer screens. Check out Useit.com and in particular, how users read on the web. Also check out my posts about how to write for a blog and how to Write strong headlines. Headlines are important because most people read blogs using RSS readers and use headlines to decide whether to read the whole post. (My favourite: man bites robotic dog and Darren Strange’s Bill Gates runs like a girl).
15. Give people different ways to read: Make the online visit easy to read - don’t go for crazy colours or unreadable fonts. Many bloggers overlook email but FeedBlitz makes it easy for non-RSS subscribers to get Bad Language in their inbox. Make sure you have a visible, easy to spot RSS subscription button. However, I would avoid the icon clutter that some blogs display when they try to accommodate every single blog reader and every single news aggregator. It’s your site, not a billboard for other people’s.
16. Schedule blog upgrade days. Maintaining a blog is not just about writing content. I try to dedicate a day every two to three months to upgrading the site itself. This means recategorising posts, checking for broken links, implementing new features and other engineering stuff. I know just about enough HTML and coding to tinker with a site’s template but not enough to build a new template. However, there are plenty of people who can help with this stuff and one way to stand out from the crowd is to have a unique site design as well as unique content. For more information about my blog is built, see Slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails.
17. Monitor your stats. Anyone who is a true blogger will be addicted to their stats. But what is interesting is how I have changed the way I use them over time. Initially, I was obsessed by the raw visitor numbers. While these are still important, I am much more interested now in what brings people to the site, what posts they liked, whether they revisit and how often, what they search for and so on. I’m trying to use the stats to help me build a better site for my readers, not to gratify my own ego (well a little bit of that too.)
18. Market your blog. Occasionally people ask me to contribute to their sites, perhaps with by-lined articles or interviews. For example, I write a free monthly column on Visual Thesaurus. This brings in a nice stream of new visitors who are interested in writing. I also make an effort to comment on sites and posts that are relevant to my readers and my areas of interest. This is probably the main form of blog marketing. It takes time but it pays long-term dividends. I still get new visitors from comments I wrote six months ago. However, the comments have to be appropriate, useful and link to a relevant page on my site. Comment spamming is naughty. Then there is the old fashioned kind of marketing. I like to my blog from my personal site, from my email sig, from presentation decks, in fact I mention it pretty much any time I can.

I am passionate about website usability. Good copy is an important part of that but not everything. So I asked John Allwright, head of web design and development at Microsoft UK, and John Harris, a user experience evangelist there, to talk about what makes websites good.

Full disclosure: my company, Articulate Marketing, does a lot of work for Microsoft, although this conversation was triggered by an article on the BBC’s website, websites face four-second cut-off. This reported that 75% of users would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load.

What are the most common usability problems you deal with at Microsoft?

John Allwright: The same problems that any large corporation faces. It comes down to how you do content management. Everyone wants to be on the front page of Microsoft.com and obviously, they can’t be. The number of pages you can host is endless (actually in the order 5m pages across the whole of Microsoft) but then it becomes an issue of navigation.

How important is search to usability and navigation?

John Allwright: We do surveys of how people find information about our products. Generally, they come to it through a search engine (obviously Live.com!). We’d like people to access the information more easily from within the site.

It’s interesting how people perceive websites. When asked where they got some information, people will quote the search engine [that they used to find a piece of information] rather than the site that served it up.

John Harris. It’s increasingly a case that people arrive at a landing page and do a search rather than spend three or four minutes browsing. Whichever search engine you used, trying to find the right document among 150,000 pages is quite difficult. People expect to see a search box. It’s not just best practice but it’s now an expectation.

Is loading speed still relevant with so many people on broadband?

John Allwright: It’s still a problem. There are a whole bunch of things that can contribute to slow loading. Even with broadband, some sites still seem to take an age to load. Loading times are a user experience issue. If you can’t deliver your pages quick enough, there are lots of other people out there who can do it better.

John Harris: A lot of people get fixated on home page download speed. What they fail to appreciate is that if the server is on a heavy load, the speed might very. Big ecommerce sites actually see sales drop off in real time on slow servers. Sometimes, a slow response isn’t down to the site design. It can be an internet blockage or a slow server. Equally, you can have a page load instantly and then pop up an advert that takes a while. Bingo, you’ve lost them.

Why do sites get so bloated?

John Harris: it’s a lot of different factors. Quite often, it’s the difficulty of standing up to a client that is demanding, say, flash intro animations. The large agencies and big design companies deliver really good, compelling websites. In the mid market, the designers perhaps feel uncomfortable standing up to clients.

Another reason is that a lot of companies struggle with the whole idea of user experience. They like the sound of it but then it is ‘show me the cold hard facts.’ There’s always a moment of scepticism around user experience because you can’t prove the point until you’ve made the changes.

It’s also a question, often, of making small, detail changes. Too often there seems to be a sense that people need to replace a whole website with another website when optimising the way a single form works could be more effective. User experience isn’t about building a whole website but about concentrating on where it goes wrong.

Web 2.0 – myth, reality or promise?

John Allwright: My personal opinion is that it’s a useful vehicle for discussing the state of the web. Some people see it as gradient shades, rounded corner and a bit of AJAX. But there are more fundamental things at work. For example, demographic changes, increasing broadband and user-contributed data mean that new business models spring out of it. It’s a way of reflecting on what is possible now. I don’t want ring fence it with any particular technology or any particular vendor. People’s definitions vary but that doesn’t matter.

What does it mean for Microsoft?

John Allwright: We’ve debated this long and hard in the UK. What it means to us is to be a voice at the table when people are talking about it. To have something to add to the discussion. Of course, some of it is tactical – we have an AJAX offering, for example. But strategically, it’s about engaging in the right discussions and not being excluded.

John Harris: From a design perspective, what I really like and what Microsoft is getting is the ability to push better, more interesting interaction. It is a great time for people to be building stuff, playing around with ideas. From my side of the table, I don’t think there’s any scepticism around ‘Web 2.0’ but we do have to make the bets in the right place. It’s not like when the web took off in the first place when people charged in and tried to do as much as possible. It’s about making it all work together. It’s no good having great technologies for the sake of great technologies. We’re not being cautious. We’re making sure that what we release, when we release it, is usable.

What do bloggers need to learn about user experience and usability?

John Harris: I guess it’s how you treat your audience. A lot of people worry about frequency – should I blog every day? You get a lot of blogs where there are lots of one line link-based posts that don’t provide any additional information for readers. People are looking for consistency. Putting up a really interesting piece once a month could be good. It’s about finding your own style and rhythm.

There seems to be a lot of consistency between blog user interfaces from different vendors. Does that hamper usability or not?

John Allwright: RSS readers are very handy for getting nuggets of information. There might definitely be space for someone to take that to the next level where you have a richer experience more like reading a magazine online.

We’ve been working on a reader for the New York Times for some of their online content. [It has lots of different ways of navigating form article to article.] If your content becomes interesting and you can start relating blog posts to others within the same blog then it becomes more than a stream of consciousness.

How about a quick plug for your new design tools?

Microsoft Expression is a new family of programs aimed at designers that are focused on experience design. When most sites want something more than AJAX they look to Flash. A lot of times, it’s the right answer, but sometimes you want to go further or reach deeper into the capabilities of the desktop, such as 3D acceleration and Expression enables that.

Technorati Tags: usability, website, Microsoft Expression, John Harris, John Allwright, Microsoft, content management, blogs

I saw an interesting article posted about the “G’zOne,” a new phone possibly from Casio on the great Strategic Name Development Blog. The author, William Lozito, says that the name “left most consumers scratching their heads.” Not really surprising.

Some good examples of technology names: Mac, iPod, Windows, Razr. It may be difficult to come with a really outstanding name (Jon may disagree - he runs a naming company) but it surely can’t be that difficult to avoid coming up wiht a terrible one.

I’ve posted about this before, including:

• Stupid product names
• Stupid product names II (Nintendo Wii and Microsoft OneCare)
• Why are plane names so boring?
• A rose by any other name (how I came up with Articulate)

Technorati Tags: Naming, Casio, brands, G’zOne, Jon Fredkove

Apparently Nick Pope, an ex-Civil Servant, reckons the UK is wide open to alien invasion.  Actual aliens from outer space.  Seriously.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/10/brit_aliens/

So, in the interests of saving the planet and protecting humanity, I researched ten tips for protecting yourself.

1. Wear silver foil on your head.  It keeps out the alien mind control rays.
2. Use an Apple Mac to write an anti-alien virus program.  It’ll only take five minutes.
3. If that doesn’t work, give them a cold.
4. If the aliens are robots, confront them with impossible logic problems.
5. On discovery of a government plot to collaborate with aliens to enslave the human race, work alone or with one partner for five years without ever mentioning your discoveries to the media.  One good conspiracy deserves another.
6. For God’s sake, take off those hands free cellphone headsets.
7. It’s best if you let alien returnees loose in the community.  They’ll never reveal their secret powers or manifest destiny if you keep them locked up and under observation. Alternatively, abandon them on an island with polar bears and kill two series with one stone.
8. You can make an interseller communicator out of childrens toys and a broken gramaphone.
9. Keep the bedroom windows and doors locked so that aliens can’t abduct you.
10. Keep modelling equipment handy so that you can build a model of the site of first contact.  It’s much easier than raiding the garbage and less smelly.

Technorati Tags: Aliens, invasion, sci-fi, aduction

I use Harvest to track the time I spend on client projects but it costs real cash money and I’m seriously thinking of switching to SlimTimer. Why?

• It’s free. Can’t beat the price.
• It’s flexible. I can use tags to track and report on tasks.
• It’s easy. A sidebar comes up in Firefox and I click on a task to start the timer. Click on another to switch.
• It’s web 2.0-ish. Tasks can be tagged and shared.
• Good reporting. I need reports on the time I spend on different assignments for billing and it does pivot tables by user, tag and time.

I’m going to carry on playing with it but if it is effective, I’ll start using it next month for live time sheet data.

Both Harvest and SlimTimer are good for billing purposes.  I prefer working on a fixed price per project basis so charging by the day feels uncomfortable for me.  This is why I like to have really detailed breakdowns of exactly what I was doing for my customer’s money.

Sometimes I look back on a day and wonder where the time went.  Being able to track what I did in detail - even non-billable hours - is very helpful.  I don’t do this kind of tracking on every task, every day but it’s an interesting experiment to run for a week.  What do you ACTUALLY spend your time on?  If anything’s possible, what’s important?

Technorati Tags: GTD, timesheet, time, tracking, procrastination, concentration

Regular readers will know that I have a private pilot’s licence and suffer from compulsive flying disorder.  I fly a Cirrus SR-22 out of an airfield in Northwest London and I edit a flying website, ModernPilot.com.

Anyhow, I saw this video on YouTube with a side-by-side film of someone landing a real plane at Princess Juliana Airport in the Dutch Antilles and someone landing there with Microsoft Flight Simulator X.  It’s hard to tell which one is real and which is the sim.  (Clue the one on the right is the sim.)

It almost made me want to give up flying.  I mean, where’s the challenge if you can do and see the same thing at home for £30.  Then, on Saturday, it was such a beautiful day, my wife and I decided to go flying.  Two hours later we were in Cornwall on our way to Rick Stein’s for lunch.  It was such a beautiful flight that I forgot my flight sim depression.

I took this picture on the flight from about 5,000 feet.  It shows Exeter in the foreground and Torbay in the distance, dusted with a light mist and a million miles of visibility.  This is the area where I grew up and went to school. It simply couldn’t be generated in a flight sim and - believe me - it looked even more beautiful in real life.  This is why I am a pilot.

Technorati Tags: Flying, Flight Simulator, YouTube

The benefits of working from home are obvious. If you’re a regular employee: you skip the commute and there are no office distractions for the day. If you’re an entrepreneur: reduced overheads, no commuting and a congenial working environment.

When I ran the computer games company I had a big office. Actually, it was so big it would have embarrassed Mussolini. I had secretaries and receptionists and security guards and all that. I don’t miss it all.

I like working from home like and according the Office of National Statistics so do 1 in 20 of the UK’s working population. Take Bellwether, an engineering consultancy. It’s a long-established but completely virtual company. They ALL work from home. It’s not just for small businesses either. For example, more than 50% of IBM’s 25,000 UK employees work from home, a customer site or more than one IBM location.

But it takes a bit of planning and work to get the perfect home office. Here are my tips:

1. Separate phone and fax. You need a phone that you can switch off when you stop work. Although I have two landlines, I use an Skype phone more and more. It integrates with my PC better than a regular phone, I get free calls in the UK and a central London phone number for people to call me on. I use a Plantronics CS60-USB handsfree headset so I can talk and type. I also use HotRecorder to record interviews.
2. Keep work and home separate. Ideally, you need a separate room or outbuilding for work. It’s good to shut the door on work at the end of the day. It also shuts out distractions. I also use Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones with noise-canceling but no music to shut out sounds from outside. (See my earlier post on how to concentrate).
3. Stay green. I got the local council to give us a couple of recycling bins for our block of flats. Direct.gov.uk has links to all the local councils in the UK and you can check what arrangements are available in your area. I get my electricity from Good Energy, which supplies 100% renewable electricity (unlike many so-called ‘green’ tariffs from other suppliers). Finally, I used Carbon Neutral to offset my car, gas and flying with trees.
4. Office stuff. Just because you’re not in the office doesn’t mean you don’t need office stuff. Get a stationery cupboard, a shredder, a filing cabinet and even a water cooler. A good filing system is vital. I don’t use it but friends swear by Paper Tiger filing software. I sold my lovely Aeron chair cheap on eBay and now I regret it. The flip side is that if you want a lovely Aeron chair cheap, go to eBay.
5. Business class IT. Here’s my set up: I have a Dell server running Windows Small Business Server 2003 in my kitchen cupboard. I also have an HP DAT72 backup drive which runs every night to backup my email and work files. I do a full server backup over several tapes monthly. I also have an 250GB external hard disk attached which does a full server backup once a week. The whole setup cost me under £1,500. I set it up myself but you can get a techie for half a day for a few hundred pounds to do it for you. I have friends who use Cobweb, who provide the Exchange Server functionality on a fully outsourced basis. Get Safe Online has useful IT security advice for small businesses.
6. Everywhere is your office. I use a local club for interviews and meetings. Starbucks or Cafe Nero are just as good. Other people rent meeting rooms from local serviced offices, such as Regus. I also use my server to give me mobile email on my Orange C600 smartphone. This means I can synch inbox, diary and contacts anywhere.
7. Be businesslike. Just because you work from home doesn’t mean you have to be amateur about the way you run your business. How I do my marketing is probably another post but invoicing on time and chasing payment needs to be done in a professional way. (I really like MoneyClaim.gov.uk for collecting very late debts - it’s an online court service from the UK government. Very efficient. Very effective.) For time tracking, I use a great online application called Harvest. One of my clients has got me using OB10 for online electronic invoicing. I’ll see how it works in practice but it could be a great way to send and receive all my invoices.
8. Be like a small big business. Most of my work is for very large companies, like HP, MessageLabs and Microsoft, and I spend a lot of time thinking about whether there is anything they have that I can replicate. I have a company website (Articulate Marketing), this blog and a client-only Extranet (provided by Basecamp). Between these sites, my server and my communications, I’m not sure there is. Apart from a shiny reception and a parking lot.
9. Build your network. Well, actually, there is one exception. I don’t have lots of employees. This is a very deliberate choice for me. When I sold my last business I had something like 65 people on the payroll. They were good guys, but the payroll and overheads became the tail that wagged the dog. I spent more time dealing with personnel issues than I did with growing the business. D’oh! Now I prefer to work with other free agents on an arm’s-length contractor basis. Finding a good contractor takes at least as much work as recruiting and training up a good employee but the relationship is much more businesslike and less paternalistic. I work with designers, web developers, photographers, other writers, PRs and my excellent proofreader on this basis. I haven’t tried any kind of contractor introduction agency website yet - I wonder if anyone has any experience of working with them.
10. Insurance and tax. In the UK, you need public and employer’s liability insurance and you need to figure out how to treat your home office from a tax perspective. It’s different for different people so I won’t give advice here. However, Business Link has some useful tips.

Technorati Tags: productivity, GTD, home, office, mobile, flexible, working

Samuel Johnson, the author of the famous dictionary, once said, “any man may write if he will set himself doggedly to it.”

In my case, I need a little encouragement.  This is why I like Joe’s Goals.

It’s a free, online service that lets you set up daily goals or habits and then check them off each day as they are completed.   For example, mine has:

• Get up at 6am
• Write blogs
• Write 1,000 words
• Five fruit and veg
• Write diary
• Meditate

I also use the notebook feature to keep a food diary.  For more examples of what people track using Joe’s goals, see his ‘zeitgeist‘ page.  Another cool feature is the ability to add a sort of progress graph to your Google home page.

Overall, one of the more useful online tools and you can’t beat the price.

Technorati Tags: Joe’s Goals, GTD, get up early, habits, diet

• Got Grave? Gallows humour of the first order. I know blogged about this on Monday but really you’ve got to check it out.
• Merlin’s list of five things. Some very funny, as in ‘Five things that I’ll bet can be hard for pirates.”
• Scott Baradell’s Spin Thicket. A kind of Digg for the PR industry.
• Get Safe Online (The Blog).  Everything you wanted to know about internet security, in plain English.
• Will Wright’s Bibliography (from Kottke).  Years ago I designed SimIsle, a rainforest simulator, for Maxis.  I met Will Wright often and worked with him on the game.  Talking to him was half conversation, half seminar.  Always a delight.  This post and the links in it capture that nicely.

I was going to post my recent article for Director about “Web 2.0,” but then I saw this, collapsed laughing and wanted to share it.

It comes from the excellent Boing Boing blog.

Sometimes a pie chart is worth a thousand jokes.