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1. Brushing teeth
2. Eating breakfast
3. Doing laundry [if you skip this today to blog instead, imagine you have to wait a week before doing laundry again]
4. Finding out the latest news [Reading a newspaper, watching news online or on tv, or listening to the news via radio]
5. Exercising in the morning
6. Showering
7. Spending time, romantic and non-romantic, with your significant other
8. Combing hair
9. Cleaning the house - considering the fact that if you do not clean right away, there might be ants or insects by the time you get back home
10. Taking a 10 minute nap, considering the fact that you are not feeling well because of not having enough sleep for days

What would you give up for blogging, and what would you not give up for blogging? Please let me know, thank you.

Ronald helped me with the above list. Thanks Ronald.

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1. Check for broken outgoing links

   As time passes, many websites just disappear. Because of that, many pages you link to in your blog posts will no longer exist after a year or so. Similarly, I have noticed many sites like Yahoo News changing their news links a lot, so some of the articles I have linked to in the past no longer work.

   Try to see if you can use a plugin or a script to go through all your outgoing links and check them for accuracy. Otherwise, you can manually go through random outgoing links to find links that point to dead pages, and to replace them with something else if possible.

2. Improve blog based on what users are looking for

   This one can revolve solely around the search keywords that people use to find and browse your site. You should study the list of keywords people use on search engines like Yahoo and Ask, and you should also study the list of keywords people use within your own blog to find a specific post.

   For example, I regularly have people searching for a few keywords on my site which yield no results. Check out the following search entry, “mySQL query error: INSERT INTO ibf_member_extra” that someone searched on my site recently:

   

   The first number “1” shows that one person searched for it, and the “0” means there was no search result. Whoever searched for that keyword probably ran away, never to come back to my site. That is sad! After seeing the above search keyword, I remembered writing something about it long time ago. Of course, my site’s search was not showing any such results, so I opened my database and searched through all the posts and found the result: Validating members bug in Invision Forums, a bug fix for Invision Power Forums I wrote back in June of 2004. Now I have to fix the search results so that anyone searching for that keyword will find the appropriate post. That is how the maintenance for this specific point is done on a regular basis.

3. Improve your site’s usability

   This one should be an ongoing project. As long as you do not change the entire site design frequently which results in everyone getting confused, changing small colors, fonts or the way you word things should help you make your website easier to understand and use for your readers. For example, Andrea Micheloni recently commented on my site and suggested something about better usability through better colors:

   Suggestion about The Reasoner text box input colors, by Andrea Micheloni

   If I can, I’d suggest you to change the color of text in input boxes: gray on light blue doesn’t contrast enough. And blue s can be confused with links, maybe try a different color”

   That is a very good suggestion, and you should feel really lucky if your readers start giving you suggestions. I feel happy and lucky because of that suggestion. Upon further observation, I realize that the colors do in fact cause some confusion. I am going to change my site soon to implement that suggestion to improve The Reasoner’s usability. Thank you Andrea!

4. Ask users/readers what they want on the site

   This is something you can do on a regular basis. Allow people to contact you easily if you have any questions. Publicize your contact page so much that anyone who thinks of finding out more about you thinks of your Contact page first.

   For example, I try to tell everyone to contact me through the contact page. That page lists multiple ways to contact me, including contacting me via my cell phone. The best feedback I get is from you. Usually, if a person makes a site, that person is probably going to like it because they made it. Bloggers should look at things from different perspectives, and asking users for suggestions is a good step in that direction. Polls and forums are also good ways to ask readers for suggestions. Remember to actually listen to your readers when you ask them for suggestions through comments or polls.

5. Check your blog stats to see what things are working and what needs improvement

   Vivien suggested this while we were discussing this article. You can check your RSS feed and site stats regularly to see which posts are getting attention, and which posts are always lonely. By checking these stats, you can see which pages result in more views, which result in less views, and so on. That will allow you to see if certain pages have some elements which are either attracting visitors or scaring them away.

   Also, your site stats can tell you if changing various things results in more or less people coming to your site. Those various things can include changing the layout, colors, fonts, types of posts, new features to the site like forums, etc.

Those are the 5 blog maintenance task that I think you can work on regularly. These 5 tasks can help you optimize your blog on a regular basis.

What do you think of the above? What are some of the things you work on regularly to keep your blog up and running nicely?

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