Quick Online Tips celebrates 2 years of blogging this month. Since the first post went live in December 2004, the popularity of Quick Online Tips has been on the rise. Switching to our own domain name and WordPress blogging platform was a good move which has added credibility, a professional image and a lot more to this blog.
To make this blog more useful to readers who have kept it going with their comments, suggestions, criticism, and backlinks, I introduced some changes over the last few weeks which I hope you will like.
1. Switch to full text feeds – I know you will like this. If you are reading this post in a feed reader, it should come as a nice surprise. This is the first post going live with full text in feeds. Many readers asked for it and I hope it lasts this time (after all my reservations to the issue of full feeds).
2. Increased font size – Web 2.0 has introduced website design concepts with smaller font sizes and larger computer screen sizes. I found myself constantly increasing font size on websites and blogs to read more comfortably (using my trusted Text size toolbar). But I realized I was using the same small fonts. So the main content text is up a few sizes to make you read with ease. (of course there are more tweaks to reduce eyestrain)
3. No social bookmarking links – You might remember multiple links to digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, reddit which added to the clutter. I found very few people actually used these links. I use del.icio.us and have never used these links on any blog. I use my favorite bookmarklet or firefox extension to do the job. So they are gone… (lots of discussion here)
4. Professional logo – is the smart work of Got Logos – home of the $25 cheap yet professional logo. It blends with the site and they gave me a transparent background one too. (you know how much I like to play with the CSS and blog colors). I hope you like it.
5. No Feed Subscribe Buttons – There are so many wonderful feed readers out there and every one has their own favorite RSS aggregator (I use Google Reader). Again RSS readers have their own bookmarklets or open feed readers with “Add feed” links to do the job. So those multiple buttons have been replaced by a drop down list to save space and reduce the clutter.
6.Translate articles easily – At the bottom of the blog are quick links to translate any page to multiple languages easily. That should help non-english readers get our content in their language of choice and read it easily.
7. Date on top – the date on which the articles was posted in now easily visible on top. Since many readers visit via search engines and may quote articles, highlighting the date in a prominent place is important so the reader knows that it is a recent or older article.
To keep updated about our how we are doing, keep checking the about us section. I hope you like the changes for Quick Online Tips 2.0! Your suggestions for improvement are always welcome.