Thursday, July 31, 2008

Blogspot cares about spammers more then about regular users - vital things that Blogger lacks

Damn. Insomnia is not the best thing you can have on a weekday.
But since I'm here, I might as well spend this time for something useful. Like, pondering about things that we currently have in Blogger that are useful only for splogs (like, Show Link Fields option in Settings->Formatting) and things that would make Blogger experience not only pleasurable, but also more effective.

So, here goes list of Blogger features that cry and beg to be implemented:
  • Ability to set meta keywords for every post page.
  • Ability to set (or automatically generate from content) meta description.
    Meta keywords and meta description are very important for good indexing and more precise results for your pages from search engines. Right now, you actually can set these meta tags - using the trick that I described in how to optimize your blogger post page titles for search engines, adding <meta name="keywords" content="keywords, for, your, site"> and <meta name="description" content="description for your site" > under lines that start with <title> - but this can only be done globally for the blog. While still giving a positive boost, it is not as good as it could be - you could specify keywords manually, and description could be automatically taken from the first paragraph of the post. Could be. If Blogger team wasn't too busy implementing comment moderation in Malay.
  • Image titles and alt text in editor  - blogger in draft features a very nice picture upload interface, together with live picture size selection bar that appears under the picture if you click on it in editor. But if you are at least a bit familiar with SEO and have enabled enhanced image search (you did enable it, didn't you? it's free and takes one click on a checkbox in Google Webmaster Tools) - then you will have to switch to Edit HTML mode and add image's alt and title parameter text by hand if you want your images to take advantages of Google Image search.
    Why title and alternate text for images is important - read in the next article.
  • Title text for links  - the previous also applies for links. To specify link title you have to hack html - I don't mind it, I usually type my articles in raw html, yet switching from compose mode if you are there just to specify link title (including searching for the correct place afterwards) is just... too much of a hassle.
  • Related posts widget - is it that hard? Feed-based JavaScript solutions only slow the page down. Significantly.
  • Ability to set favicon.ico file
As an additional note from widget developer, I would also like to point that Blogspot widget API doesn't work as stated - widget.template form input field is simply ignored - rendering any attempt to fully utilize Blogger templating features absolutely useless - effectively pushing you into 'JavaScript only' field.

I try not to provide non-constructive critics. If I am ever challenged for my words - mark this - then I promise to implement or help implementing all the features listed in this post free of charge, even signing a non-disclosure agreement about parts of code that I might see.

*Here should be a fancy ending phrase. Right now I can't think of any*
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It totally wasted my time when i searching a solution on ="description automatically taken from the first paragraph of the post"when landing at your blog.
Nice SERP ,anyway;)You have a great blog.

Radith Prawira said...

thx..stumbled this page already :)

Cranked said...

Thanks, Radith :)

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