Blog Exposure Through Submission

For whatever reason we blog one thing remains constant, we want our blog to gain exposure. Even if you posted the highest quality of post, it would still go to waste if there is no one to read it. Naturally exposing your blog to the world is a high priority if not the top priority and there are many different ways to gain exposure. The easiest & cheapest way would be submitting your blog or blog post to other websites.

Every one of the sites that you submit to have their own visitors even if you only managed to grab 1% of the visitor’s attention, that can add up to a lot of them if you submit to 100 of them. 100 of them isn’t really a lot especially in design websites, where almost every one of these websites have community news where anyone can submit a post to be displayed at their site.

To that end, below is a list of design websites that you can submit your blog post to. Yes, there is exactly one hundred of them sorted in alphabetical order.

The thing about long list though is that they are error prone so if you spot any, please inform me. If you liked to submit your site to be included into the list you are welcome to do so as well.

The Problem With Drop Cap

I’m pretty sure drop cap requires no introduction when it is commonly used in print material such as magazines & books, sometimes on the web as well. Creating drop caps is relatively simple, we style them in the early days using the <span> tag, then came the CSS selector where you can easily target the first letter of the paragraph using the :first-letter pseudo-element. Yes, creating drop caps is simple but to do it correctly is a different story.

To properly use drop cap, it must be on the same baseline as the last line of text it spans and on the same cap height as the first line of text. To achieve that in with CSS is actually harder than we imagine due to the fact that almost every rendering engine treats the drop caps a little differently.

To give you an idea of what I mean below are the drop caps, rendered with padding, margin and line-height set at 0 on different browsers.

As you can imagine styling them to render almost perfectly if not perfect across all browsers is a very challenging task. I find that it can only be done with a mixture of margin & line-height. Though to find the perfect mix requires heaps of trial & error which quite frankly is a little annoying.

I’m sure some of you may have more insight into this problem and I’d be very interested in seeing any evidence or suggestions you have on this problem.

Dropping Blog Comments

As some of you might know, this site has no comment system. Many people wonder why I disable it when Wordpress has a great comment system—all I need to do is just style it—ready to be use.

No More Housekeeping

As Kroc Camen puts it “Public comment threads just encourage people to write a lot of words, and say nothing.”, and I do agree with that. When it comes to blog comments on the web, most of them are useless. There are too many comments like “Great post, keep up the work!” & “This is a stupid post” that does nothing but clutter up the comment thread.

Some say having a community inspires debate, but what I mainly observe is through the power of Internet anonymity, it mostly inspires hit-and-run comments. Unintelligent, senseless spams that in the end requires the site owner to do regular housekeeping is a waste of time. Wasting time of the site owner where he or she could use that time to write a quality article.

It Inspires Debate

Quality rebuttals, the ones that results in quality exchange of ideas. It is one thing to post meaningless comment on someone’s blog, it is another when you argue your points with your readers watching. When other people are looking you, its harder to make a fool of yourself. Who doesn’t care of their own reputation, especially those who have many readers following and judging everything you type.

One example of this is when Kroc Camen linked one of my post. His comments was constructive, leaving me reflecting on some of the poor choices I made. It is no shame in being told you are wrong, in fact I would appreciate it more when people points out what I’ve done wrong. How else can one be right without being wrong?

Show What You Want To Show

Take this site for example, this website belongs to me, it is written for people that wants to read my site. When my visitors visits my site, I expect them to read what I write. What I written has always been what I could to my best ability and I want my visitors to see what I want them to see.

That can never happen when the blog is bloated with comments. With the addition of comments, visitors that read the blog will need to skim through the content and decide which content is worth the look and which isn’t. That is nothing like what I imagine the visitors will need to behave when they come to this site.

What Then?

I am not here to suggest an alternative but people have been exploring different ways to bring the discussion elsewhere, be it with twitter or forums. They all have their strengths and weaknesses.

As for me I prefer the good old fashion email. It is been around longer than I have and it has served the people on the web quite well. Those who absolutely must get their comments out of their chest can email me. Those who just want to say hi can email me. Those who wants to inform me of their rebuttal can email me. =)

Welcome, to the digital home of Keefe Tang

This is where I keep my opinions, code snippets & things I refer all in one place. If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line, if you don’t, how about subscribing to my feed.