wayne on June 20, 2008
I found a listing of many blog directories on TopRankBlog. It's a nice list and it has saved me the time of finding them all on my own. Got to love those list posts!
This weekend I will be spending some more time on a new page I'm creating called Widget Hell. Widget Hell will be the page where I place any reciprocal links that are required by some blog directories. Why Hell? Well, in the end, the page is going to take forever to load. A hellishly slow loading page. :)
Oh Wayne, why so slow?
You see, each and every image that you place on your page needs to be downloaded from either your site, or someone else's site. What most blog directories do is provide the HTML you need to use for a reciprocal link.
What happens then? You copy the code and paste it into your blog however you need to. So, as long as that image and link are on your page, your blog can stay in the directory. That's what a reciprocal link is. Having a link between two places. You link to me, I'll link to you. Simple.
Mind you, the reciprocal link doesn't need to be an image per se...it can be a simple text link also. However, my plans for Widget Hell are graphical. Here is a sample Widget...I think this one will be in the 3 Ring of Widget Hell, The Feed Readers.
The problem comes when you have so many images that come from too many different places, the end user (your audience) will experience a slow loading page. Bad form, you don't want people to get frustrated, right? Your pages should (ideally) be snappy and load lightning quick.
The alternative can be time consuming, but perhaps worth the effort if you are going to have many images like this. Simply save the image and upload it to your server so you can reference it locally. That way the image comes from your web site and not another's. This will make more sense to many when I get my Widget Hell page up. In fact, I may make two versions, one with the images stored on their servers, and the other with the images stored on my server. The load time comparison would be interesting if nothing else.
Case in point
If you have seen my site before I added the FeedFlare to my posts and pages, the site loaded relatively quickly. Now that I have added FeedFlare, and have this part of the site that is going out to another server to get data, my site tends to hang a little, and then present itself. I'm not so sure I like that...
It's Never Enough, and it's never done
I decided it best to create a page, similar to a 'partners' page where most(?) bloggers would place these widgets. You surely don't want these in your master template so they load on each and every page. It's better to give them a single page, so that people who are actually interested in them can go and look at them if they choose to. After all, you just wanted your blog in another directory, right?
Over time I'm going to find more directories that I will want to submit to, and I'll want to have a nice, easy way to provide a reciprocal link for them. Widget Hell will serve that purpose for me. Perhaps it will also point out that we have way to many directories on the Internet!
I think the hardest thing I will encounter is describing my blog. When I say programmer, I'll probably scare non-programmers away, so perhaps I should refrain from having that in the description. I don't know. Each time I've had to write a description, I did so right then and there. I have not taken the time to actually formalize the description. Perhaps that is my first step right there. That makes sense to me.
I will gladly take any suggestions on a description, so if you have some ideas, please let me know by way of comment or email.
In the meantime, if you haven't already subscribed to my blog feed, please do so to hear how things turn out with Widget Hell! It'll be a hoot!
