"Sanitation Updates" - One of the IRC blogs

If you use WASH as a noun, rather than a verb, you gotta be working in the humanitarian field. WASH stands for “WAter, Sanitation and Hygiene”, one of the key sectors in the field of aid and development.

As with any nonprofit area, advocacy, information dissemination and project discussions are key to the WASH sector, so it was to no surprise I recently came across a whole bunch of WASH-related blogs (see bottom).
Now, it’s not the first time I stumble upon a series of interconnected blogs around a common theme. Often these blog projects start with a lot of enthusiasm, migrating into a general frustration about the amount of time it takes to update all of them.
They often end up in the waste bin labelled “Abandoned Blogs”.
Not so with the WASH blogs-“family”, which have been updated regularly since the past three years.

That stirred my interest, and I took the opportunity to have a chat with the man behind the WASH blog initiative: Cor Dietvorst, the editor of Source Weekly at the IRC (International Water and Sanitation Centre).

Blogtips: Cor, a social media professional, it seems?
Cor: (laughs) Well, I am an information specialist at IRC in Holland, where I have worked for over 25 years. I originally studied chemical engineering but my interest soon shifted via information management to providing news services.
At IRC I am also a member of the South Asia regional team and the Transparency and Accountability thematic group, with a special interest in the “right to information”.
Recently I also facilitated a workshop on social media and web writing in Nepal.

Blogtips: “IRC” – Not the International Refugee Committee, as I know it, but International Water and Sanitation Centre… What is the IRC?
Cor: We are an independent knowledge centre dedicated to the field of water supply, sanitation, hygiene and integrated water resources management. We focus on improving  livelihoods for the poorest since 1968.
IRC has three main programmes: a core programme funded by Dutch development aid focusing on innovation and information services, and two large multi-country research/learning programmes funded by the Gates Foundation – WASHCost on life-cycle costs and Triples-S on sustainable water services.
We have over 60 staff mostly based in The Hague, and probably about the same number contracted in-country for programmes and projects. Our focus countries are Ghana, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Honduras

Blogtips: Where does social media fit within the work you do?
Cor: We work with a wide network of partners, so blogs are an easy way to keep everyone involved, and to dispatch information.
The more so as one of the key purposes of our organisation is to ensure water hygiene and sanitation services are not only delivered, but also maintained with the necessary skills. Thus training and capacity building is a key element for our long-term sustainability strategy. And once again, blogs are an easy way to assemble this information, stimulate discussions, and disseminate the information we collect. Better than a dusty library in The Hague! (laughs).

Blogtips: It is always interesting to find out how social media came into an organisation. In the IRC, was that a conscious policy decision?
Cor: Well, staff from the Information and Communication Section started using blogs for workshops and meetings in 2007. That caught on immediately, so we started the WASH News blogs –the once you discovered- soon after that.
Last year IRC also collaborated with other partners to set up the “Water Cube” channel on Blip.tv for the Stockholm Water Week.
We have other tools like a Twitter hashtag #wash4dev and Zotero for reference sharing we use on experimental basis.

Blogtips: It seems most started as an experiment, no?
Cor: Yep, as many nonprofit organisations, IRC has no system-wide social media strategy as such. We started it, it clearly served a purpose, and we continue to expand it.

The man behind the IRC blogs: Cor Dietvorst

Blogtips: When I first came across the series of WASH blogs, I thought: “Gosh, some blogger got really enthusiastic here”.
Cor: The WASH News blogs were set up in 2007 as part of the Source Water and Sanitation News Service. For my key job as editor of the English Source Weekly newsletter and web site, I already collect a lot of news. Only 10-20% of that information, I can process into the Source newsletter. The rest remained well, … on my computer. I thought “what a pity… All of this information remaining unused, unpublished”… Many people are interested in this data (smiles). So,… blogs were a natural way to share the information I had collected anyways.
Sanitation Updates has already been set up by Dan Campbell in 2007 in Blogger in support of the 2008 International Year of Sanitation. I asked if I could join and transferred it to WordPress. The WASH Vacancies blog I have opened to other sector agencies, so that it can more or less run by itself.
But indeed, after a while the blogs took up too much time for me to handle on my own, so a few other colleagues help me out.

Blogtips: That’s how it started: you used blogs to publish previously collected information. Why blogs? You had a corporate website also, no?
Cor: The main benefit from the blogs is that we can now provide a more up-to-date news service for sector professionals in the WASH sector. It is easier to publish information on blogs than on a corporate website.

Blogtips: Was there any integration between the blogs and your corporate website?
Cor: We have a natural integration as we publish different regional and thematic news feeds from the blogs on the corporate site. Even though, to be honest, we haven’t really examined if this leads to more page views on our website.

Blogtips: Blogs make it easier to publish information, good, but any other advantages for the blogs?
Cor: Oh yeah..! The blogs attract many more comments than the news on our corporate website. This rarily leads to a real discussion, but it is a good way to build some kind community. The interactivity of blogs is definitively a plus.
But there is more: blogs have also increased our visibility. We are reaching a larger and broader public.

Blogtips: How much traffic do you get on the blogs, then?
Cor: The blogs got nearly 300,000 page views in 2009. That is 30% more than our English newsletter on the corporate site. We recently got a request from a large NGO to start a Spanish language version of Sanitation Updates.

Blogtips: All of the WASH blogs are on WordPress.com using a simple theme. Was that a conscientious choice?
Cor: We started with Blogger in 2007, but colleagues in and outside IRC convinced us that WordPress.com offered more functionality. At that time (2008), I found the plain Cutline theme, the most appropriate. It had all the functionality we wanted. It was not too flashy neither but the custom-header option provided a nice way of giving every blog its own “face”.
The choice for different regional and thematic blogs was chosen to mirror the different headings of our newsletter.

Blogtips: You must have a lot of content to generate, with 20-odd blogs. Do you cross-post, or does each have entirely different content?
Cor: Of course, I do cross-post. But not so much out of “lack of material”: as the subjects of the different blogs overlap, so does the content. The most active blog feeds some contents to the regional to thematic blogs.

Blogtips: Which is the most active blog, then?
Cor: “Sanitation Updates”, which I  co-manage with my colleague Dan Campbell, Web Manager at Environmental Health at USAID.

Blogtips: The blogs are 2 to 3 years old now, would you have done anything different, given what platforms were available back then?
Cor: Maybe I would have concentrated on a limited number of regions and themes, or from the start made a bigger effort to involve more contributors.

Blogtips: If today, you had 1 month, and 10,000$, what would you do differently.
Cor: Well, as they say, the “future is now”. I am happy to say we actually have a designer and a programmer working with us now, looking how the blogs can be better integrated into a new Source news page on our corporate website.
What I would like to do in the future is to set up a network of local blog-correspondents: “WASH sector staff armed with smart-phones sending in field reports”, that is my dream!

Blogtips: Wishing you the best for the future, Cor. Your blogs are an excellent example of how to use blogs for nonprofit. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Cor: Welcome!

Here is the full list of Cor’s WASH blogs:

777,  Seven hundred seventy-seven.

That is the amount of nonprofit blogs I have collected so far. They are all on my Delicious bookmarking list. Excerpts from their posts are republished on Humanitarian News and The NonProfit Blogs.

777, discarding blogs which have not been updated since six months.  777, including the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. With absolute gems, but also “so-so” blogs. Blogs with daily updates, and blogs with one post per month. Team blogs, project blogs, blogs advising on nonprofit fundraising and those written by field workers deep in Africa. Photo blogs and blogs supporting scientific research.

For me, the nonprofit blogs collection is a good research basis:  As I flip through them, I turf different criteria, like their pagerank, an analysis published in an earlier post. Or I jot down different observations.

As I was processing a batch of 150 new blogs in the last week, I took note of common problems I saw with many blogs. Let’s call it the “Top 10 of Nonprofit Blog Problems”:

Blog Problem 1: I have no clue what your blog is about

As I showed in my case study: about 85% of all traffic on your blog, are occasional or new visitors. They stumble upon your blog via search engines, bookmarking sites or forums. As the case study showed, it only takes between 20 and 60 seconds for these new visitors to make up their mind, whether to stay on your blog or not. Thus, first impressions are important.

When I come across a new blog, one of the first things I look for is: “What is this blog all about”? I look at the title, glance quickly through the last blogposts, and often I check an “About” link on the page.

It is striking how many blogs obscure what they are all about. Is it a field blog? Are you solely writing about a certain event. Or is it about a research project? An advocacy blog?

If I can not make it out in the typical 20 to 60 seconds I spend on your blog, you lost me. As you will lose many new visitors.

My suggestions:
Take an outsider. Have your nephew, a friend or your aunt go to your blog. Give them 60 seconds. In this time they have to tell you what your blog is about. If they can’t, you will need to change something:
Make it obvious what your blog is about. Give your blog a clear title, publish a prominent tagline or slogan. Include an “About” tag somewhere on your prime real estate, as described in this post, linking to a page where you explain what your blog is all about. Ensure that “About” tag is visible on all blogposts and not just your home page.

Blog Problem 2: I have no clue what your post is about

You would be amazed how many blogs use vague titles. “June update”, “Pictures of the day”, “Links of 1/6/2010″. Those don’t tickle my interest.

Think of a post title as if it were a book title. Do you think a writer just slams any title on a book he worked on for six months? Of course not.

A post title is a teaser, just like a book title is. It should entice enough interest for people to actually read the content. Sure enough, “Links of 1/6/2010″ contains probably some weblinks you recently discovered but “Links: Agriculture research in Africa, Harvesting Techniques and more” will tease more, wouldn’t it?

Remember many of your readers get you blog updates via RSS links, Email and aggregators. New visitors find a link via a search engine. If your title does not look interesting, they will skip reading the post. Another visitor lost.

My suggestions:
Before you hit “Publish”, spent just 10 seconds thinking about the title. Ask yourself two questions: “Does it represent the content?” and “Am I teasing interest?”.

Blog Problem 3: I can not find your RSS feed

Returning visitors are a blog’s most precious resource. One new RSS subscriber, adds one more returning visitor.  So why do so many blogs hide their RSS?

Dear people, we live in the 21st century. The electronic age with its inherent information overflow. Most people don’t check updates on your blog every day, as they are following dozens of blogs. Most stay up to date via RSS readers, automatic Email updates, and aggregators. A blog without an RSS feed is a car without an engine. Nice, but pretty useless, unless if you tie a donkey in front of it. The car that is, not the blog.

Even if your blog has an RSS link, as a lazy visitor, I don’t want to go and look for it. Make my life easy please: make the RSS link prominent. Put a big fat RSS icon on your prime blog real estate and publish it correctly so browsers can pick it up.

Worse than NOT doing something, is to do something sloppy. Regularly, I come across blogs with outdated or faulty RSS links. The RSS feed is empty, contains outdated posts, links to an old Feedburner feed or the feed just does not validate. Some feeds feature blog posts with dates in the future, which appear on top of the RSS feed forever.

My suggestions:
Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog with a prominent icon or “Subscribe” link, and check your own RSS feed regularly.

Blog Problem 4: Your blog is slow

I have a very fast Internet connection, but even then, I find blogs that take forever to load. As I mentioned before, if a page doesn’t load within 5-8 seconds, you will lose one-third of your visitors. People simply don’t have patience.

The common problems are not server related, but blogger related: too many pictures, or non-compressed pictures. A heavy Flash thingie on the banner. Or they are using too many widgets or RSS feeds.

My suggestions:
In this post, I list ways to test your blog speed, and the most obvious ways to increase your blog’s download performance.
If you selfhost your blog, it is a MUST to use a good cache plugin.

Blog Problem 5: Who are you and how to contact you?

When I stumble upon a new blog, I not only want to know what the blog is about, but also who you are, or what your organisation does. Don’t hide that information from me, please!

When you publish that information, make it concrete, to the point and short. Within the text, you can link to other pages or posts describing the various aspects of the work you do, but don’t give me a four course meal if I only want a snack. Please.

Why do so many blogs make it difficult to get in contact with the blogger? Scanning through my list of 777 nonprofit blogs, I often want to write a quick note or email to the blogger, when I notice a problem. If I want to do that effort, then why would you make that difficult for me?

Suggestions:
Feature “Who are we” and “Contact us” as short but prominent links on your blog’s prime real estate. Or at least include them in your “About” text.
Ensure this link is visible on every post, not just on the home page

Problem 6: You have outdated links, missing pictures or dead videos.

As blogposts rack up, it is more and more difficult to keep track of your older posts and to keep them up to date. However, visitors do land on older posts. Outdated links to internal or external posts, “Video no longer available”  or blank spaces where “a picture once was”, all give a very sloppy impression.

And not only that, search engines are said to punish sites with excessive dead links, so in the end your pagerank might suffer if you don’t maintain your posts regularly.

My suggestions:
Use a tool like Google Webmaster or the W3C Link checker to verify your links regularly.
From time to time, just have fun, and click around your site, browse through your old posts. Not only will you see what other visitors see, but sometimes it is just fun going through stuff you wrote three years ago!

Problem 7: Your blog or your posts are messed up

Some blogs just don’t show up properly and blurbs of text, video or pictures run over the margins. Too lazy  to crop a picture to the right size? Or or ignorance on how to change the code of embedded videos to make it fit within your post column?

Remember also that inter-browser compatibility is a real challenge for a blogger.

My suggestions:
This post gives you some useful tools to check how your blog looks like in different browsers.
Spend the time to ensure the post is properly formatted.

Problem 8: Too much text

Yep, it is easy to take a Word document and then simple cut/paste to publish it. It takes a little more time to put some pictures in it, and to properly format a text into paragraphs. But boy, some blogs present just chunks of text. Chunks and chunks.

Personally, I don’t care how relevant your content is, but if it takes a real effort for me to read it, I will skip it.

My suggestions:
Use pictures (and properly compress them) to brighten up your posts.
Put some breathing space in your text and use paragraphs,  or subtitles. Emphasize the pieces which are important.

Problem 9: Too little text

Unless you have a photo blog and you only want people to admire your pictures, posts deserve a bit of text. Pictures speak a thousand words, and are a power medium, but make sure people also understand what it is all about.

A blog only showing pictures with a one liner “Our village got a new water pump” is not enough. Explain what the background is, why the village waited for a water pump, how it will change the lives of people. The pictures will convey a much stronger message with a few lines of text.

Remember we are mostly considering nonprofit blogs. Therefor, your blog is a tool to bring a message to your audience. A tool in the hands of advocacy, fundraising, public information, etc… Just a flurry of pictures gives the impression “I’ll just throw it out there, and you go and figure it out”… Is that the impression you want people to have from your nonprofit?

My suggestions:
Balance between pictures and text. Use pictures as illustrations, teasers or catalysts for the message you want to bring. A message you condense in the blog text. Make sure that message is not obscured.

Problem 10: Spelling mistakes

Sloppy, sloppy! It takes only one minute to spell check a post before it goes out. So spell check before you hit publish.

My suggestions:
Even if your blog platform does not have a spell checker, use your browser’s or cut/paste the text into your word processor and check it there.

And above all: ensure you continue to have fun while you blog!

Blogging: You Are No Longer Alone

In my tutorial series “Blogging 101 – Starting a blog from scratch” I have already covered the basic question many nonprofit organisations ask themselves: “Does my organisation need a blog?”

There was one issue I did not highlight, though: Blogging is a kind of crowd sourced knowledge management.

What do I mean by that? An example:

When I worked at the ecology lab at the University back in the 80’s, we did research on the foraging habits of migrating geese (exciting stuff, I know!). Twice a year, we published an article in a magazine. That involved a lot of to-and-fro’s between us and the publishing house, about the topic, the depth of the article, the wording, drafts, corrections. Eventually the article was published. It took weeks before it got physically distributed, and then the article resided in libraries waiting for ’someone to consult it’. It took weeks and months before we got reactions, feedback on research finished almost a year earlier. Not too much we could do with the feedback at that point.
If all went well, other authors would make a reference to our article in theirs. Sometimes years later.

Think how the Internet changed all of that. Websites democratized the publishing power, even though it was still pretty sturdy going. Standard CMS-es (Content Management Systems) governing websites are not always the easiest of mediums to publish things. Easier than printed material, but nothing compared to blogs.

Nowadays, researchers can write about any aspect of  their (ongoing) research on the fly, on their blog. Hit the “Publish” button and there it goes off in the ether. Within seconds people will start reading it, within minutes comments will come in, and a dialogue will start. Within hours search engines will have indexed the article and people all over the world, interested in the subject, can find the article and can get involved.

I might sound like ranting, but have you ever thought of the sheer raw power “blogs” give to your fingertips, people? Have you ever really considered the way blogging can, and should, change the way nonprofit research is done? –And here I explicitly use the term “nonprofit” as “profit” research is often still covered under a veil of secrecy. God forgive if a commercial researchers would blog about their efforts to make the iPhone speech-enabled, or on the newest LCD density techniques. No, nonprofit is different. The data, the process and the outcome of nonprofit research is public property. The benevolent donors paid for it, after all.

On my personal blog, I did an experiment to test how fast search engines picked up on original content and how content got propagated through the Internet-ether. It is a simple example, but think of the applicability to your own work:

Since I installed Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, I had a weird problem: every 30 minutes or so, my /temp directory filled up with Gigabytes of AdAxxx.tmp files. I googled like nuts to find the solution, the ICT helpdesk too. It was only when I googled in different languages, I found a trace of someone with the same problem, and its solution. The person posted it on an Italian discussion forum. If it was not for that obscure post in an obscure discussion forum, I would never have found the solution. And my life would still have been miserable. Someone found a similar problem like mine, and had posted it on the Internet…. Simple as that.

So, I decided to unleash the powers of a blog. While I was laying in my hammock, in the back garden, with my laptop on my knees, I wrote a blogpost describing the problem and its solution. I hit “Publish”, and tweeted the post on my personal Twitter account and this blog’s Twitter account, @BloggerTip.

Literally one hour after I finished the post, Google had indexed it, and it returned as a top hit for the search “AdAxxx.tmp problem”:

From my hammock to the world, in less than an hour. But what was not the only thing, look at the full search result:

Google is clever: not only had it indexed my original post, but on top of that, they also found the Twitter entry, even though the tweet itself was not related to the AdAxxx problem:

RT @TheRoadTo You know what I like about blogging? It is really crowd sourced knowledge management http://bit.ly/dgzdfM

So while crawling Twitter, Google had also crawled the bit.ly link to the original post, and indexed it with the content of that link.

But there is more:

As BlogTips also displays my latest tweets  in the side column, Google found the entry, as content of this blog, and indexed it.

In short: Within one hour after publishing a blogpost, and tweeting the link, Google indexed both the post, the tweet and the blog on which the tweet was republished. Pretty groovy, no?

As I said, it is a simple example, but “Think People, Think!”. Imagine what this can mean to your nonprofit work: There you are, experimenting with a solution to a locust problem, or working with innovative ways to drill wells in Southern Sudan, or struggling to find a crop with the same nutritional value as the traditional barley a tribe used to cultivate, or just (Eureka) found a simple way to solve a complicated medical condition for one of your patients. These are all things either others can help you with, or where you can help others.

How? Blog about it, dummy!

Picture courtesy Starts with a Bang

The Blogger Preview button now does new magic

For years, bloggers cursed the lack of a real preview function in Blogger, one of the most popular blog platforms.

After you wrote a blogpost, the ‘old’ preview button used to bring up a pop-up screen which gave a ‘kinda’ preview of your post, which did not take into account most styling options you had in your template. That made the preview button close to useless.

It looked like Blogger is listening to its users now. After implementing an easy way to change your template template, the Blogger preview is now a “real preview”: Hit the “Preview button” and by gosh, close to what WordPress had for years already, a new window comes up, showing exactly how your blogpost will show up after you publish it, with a ribbon across the left corner saying ‘Preview’, in your localized language:

The new Blogger preview

The new Blogger Dashboard - Notice anything different?

Last night, Blogger announced their online template designer.

Go to your Blogger dashboard, click on “Design”, and you get a split screen:

Blogger template designer

The new template designer lets you change and tweak your blog to your heart’s content, from the basic layout (one-two-three column, mixed columns), to the background images, fonts and colours. In the bottom screen, you can see a preview of the changes to your actual blog.

I have to say, I am impressed. It seems Blogger is definitively moving into the 21st century

Beware of two things though:

1. if you added manual customizations to your template file, like meta data or the Google Analytics code, these customizations will not be taken into your new template. Before changing anything, make a backup of your ‘old’ template. Once done, manually paste the customizations into your new template.
   And remember, each time you change your new template, your customizations will go ‘Poof’. Really wished Google would make a widget where you can easily add often used code. I mean who does NOT run the Google Analytics code on their blog?
2. Once you change the template of your blog, loads of things, other than the pure layout might change: Changing the width of your posts will have text wrap around pictures differently. Your tables, blockquotes, picture framing,… will all look differently.
   This might make changing a Blogger template more tricky than just a few clicks. Check out the pains I had to go through when changing the template for one of my blogs.

Want to see how you can play with the new Blogger Template? I changed the layout of one of my blogs -The Non-Profit Press- in 3 minutes flat.

More and more people browse blogs from their mobile devices. While you can view any website from your iPhone or Blackberry, the pages will appear with a very small font, and the whole thing will look very cramped, unless if the website supports a mobile theme. Only then, the site will appear suitable for easy mobile browsing.

Mobile browsing will increase in popularity: Few mobile phones are sold anymore without a browser functionality.  The price of 3G mobile network access is going down, and WiFi hotspots spreading like wild fire.  So if you think about expanding the functionality of your blog, think “Mobile Themes”.

A mobile theme enabled website will either automatically detect the visitor uses a mobile device, or at worse, the user can use a dedicated URL like mobile.yoursite.org, m.yoursite.com or mob.yoursite.com to access the mobile version of your website.

Theme-ing a site for mobile users is not for those faint of heart or for the bloggers with two left hands when it comes to the technical side of blogging. Theme-ing a site requires quite some skills. Luckily if you don’t host your blog on your own server, but use your blogservice to host it, all the work is done for you. That’s right: you don’t have to do anything, mobile themes come with the package.
On Tumblr, Posterous and WordPress.com that is. Blogger, as with many features, stays behind once again.

1. Mobile themes on Posterous

I wrote before about the new Posterous mobile phone theme, which automatically detects when a visitor uses a mobile device. Just like many features of Posterous, the theme is simple, clean but also really “plain vanilla”: apart from browsing the different posts, there are not many bells and whistles one would expect.

Posterous on an iPhone

Goodies like commenting, subscribing a Posterous blog, or a blog search are not included.

2. Mobile themes on Tumblr

Tumblr, the competing vanilla blog platform, already featured an automatic iPhone theme since a while. Mind you, that is “iPhone” and not “any mobile device”.

I use Tumblr quite extensively for a series of simple blogs aggregating content from other sources: check out AidNews, BloggingToday and NonProfitBlogs. It is also my preferred tool to collect my webclips: check out TheHorizon. Let’s have a look how these show on the iPhone:

A simple Tumblr mobile themed blog: AidNews

Yep, indeed, AidNews does not feature any pictures, so that looks a bit ‘too’ plain vanilla, right? How about this for a taste:

Browsing posts on Blogging Today

Nice, no? You just swipe from post to post. If you click on one, then this is how single posts look like:

A single post on AidBlogs Mobile

Still too plain vanilla for your taste? Well, since a month or so, Tumblr allows you to customize this mobile theme, so you can add features, such as comments, and a blog search to your heart’s delight.

3. Mobile themes on WordPress.com

Remember there are two flavours of WordPress: WordPress.org and WordPress.com. As I covered in my primer “Which blog software to use“, the first is the self-hosted version and on the second, your blog is hosted by WordPress itself.

WordPress.com features the most complete and sophisticated automatic mobile theme-ing of all blogplatforms.

While you will get a mobile version of your WordPress.com blog on any mobile device, the full bells and whistles will only show on phones with a “rich” web browser, like the iPhone and Android. The end result is truly impressive:  not only do you get access to the posts, pages, and archives, but you can also comment and search the blog. This is how it looks like:

Multiple posts on WordPress.com mobile

Now, that is what I call a “mobile theme”! Each post shows a summary with the date, author, categories and the number of comments

Expanding a post on WordPress.com mobile

When you tap the “down arrow”, you get a preview of the post.

Viewing a single post on WordPress.com mobile

And that is how a single post looks like.

Viewing the pages on WordPress.com mobile

Tapping the “down arrow” next to the banner, shows the pages, archives and a search bar.

Viewing search results on WordPress.com mobile

And that is how search results show up. Each can be previewed by tapping the “down arrow”, or shown in full by tapping the post itself.

Commenting on Wordpress.com mobile

… and commenting could not be easier.

4. Mobile themes on Blogger

After all of that WordPress splendour comes the anti-climax. Blogger.. Aaah, unfortunately, Blogger once more leaves its users high and dry: mobile theme-ing is not supported, unless if you exchange your blog template with a mobile template…. which would mean that “normal browsers” would see the mobile template too. And that is not what we want.

A pity that one of the most popular blogplatforms features… well, …so few features.

Cartoon courtesy Geek and Poke

I wrote before about Posterous, the plain-vanilla blogplatform I use mainly as alternative to Twitpic on one of my blogsites “Shot From the Hip: I take a picture with my iPhone, and mail it to my Posterous account with the subject as the title. Less than a minute later, the post appears. Including the location it was posted from, if I enabled the location services on my iPhone. Simple as that.

Five hundred pictures (or posts) later, it seems “Shot From the Hip” became a photographic journey allowing my loved once to follow what I am doing, exactly what I wanted it to be. Imagine what you can with that functionality, if you’d use it as a photo-log for your organisation’s projects, or for your field trips.

Posterous has now implemented a new feature, changing its layout and functions when it detects you browse from a mobile device.

For instance, on my iPhone, the home page of my Posterous site used to look like this:

Now, detecting the visitor uses a mobile device, the homepage shows:

Much neater, cleaner and easier to browse…

Clicking (well… “tapping” on an iPhone), on one of the posts shows the single post, automatically optimizing and resizing uploaded media such as pictures, galleries and video.. (except for the fact that iPhone does not show Flash video, of course..):

There are a few limitations: Commenting does not work (at least not on my iPhone) and there is no access to your profile or “Subscribe buttons”.

One trick: while you can switch to the “old” look by tapping on the “Use full site” button:

… there is no way back to see the mobile “look”…  Except if you delete the cookies of your mobile browser.

Many blogs grow from a blog with a simple plain template to a site combining pictures, links, widgets and text.
This is exactly what happened with my first blog: Came a time I realized it took almost 30 seconds to fully download the homepage of my blog, on an ADSL or cable connection. Around the same time I travelled to Addis Abeba in Ethiopia, and was surprised to see it took over two minutes to download my page when one had more limited connectivity.

1. Why is speed important?

Many visitors will come to your blogsite “by accident”, through a referral link or more commonly, through a Google search. In just a few seconds, these “incidental visitors” will decide whether your site is interesting or not. In just a few seconds, they will decide if they will stay, or not. We also have just a few seconds to turn him from an occasional (or unique) visitor to a regular ‘customer’, someone who will come back, bookmarking your blog, or even post it on social networks.

A couple of factors are important in this ‘flash’ decision “will I stay or not”:
1. the overall appearance or impression of the site (which they will evaluate on what they see on the top screen without even scrolling down), and
2. the download speed.

The download speed became even more important when Internet Explorer versions 7 and 8 seems to ‘block’ for seconds, while in the middle of download if they need to wait for certain widgets to complete.

So, I had to improve my download speed. Here is what I have learned:

2. Benchmark your site’s speed

Measure the speed before and after you make the improvements. Try selfseo.com (which specifies if a page doesn’t load within 5-8 seconds according to their benchmark you will lose 1/3 of your visitors.) or linkvendor.com or for a more in depth analysis, use websiteoptimization.com.

Each time you change something on your site, measure what difference the change made.

Two good tools to find out what specific parts (widgets, images, scripts,..) are slowing down your site, two great tools are Firefox Firebug and the Chrome Developer tools .
Firebug is an add-on to Firefox (download here). The Chrome tool comes built-in (goto menu>developer>Javascript console and click on Resources).

3. Slow items go last:

Have a look in what sequence your blog loads. E.g. in the case of The Other World News, the sequence is:
1st the header
2nd the left column
3rd the middle column with the posts
4th the right column
5th the bottom banner.

In the case of The Road, the sequence is:
1st the header banner
2nd all blog posts with the pictures
3rd the whole right column (darker grey), item per item.
4th the bottom banners (darker grey)

This means, if I would put something in the banner or in any of the blog posts that would not work properly, or would be slow, the rest of the page’s download will slow down.

An example: I had a widget which often caused halted the loading of my page as it was one of the first things to download on my right column. It kept the loading of the rest of the right column on hold for at least 10 seconds. I moved that widget to the part of my page which loads last (the bottom), for visitors not to notice the delay.

Recommendation: ensure you put the slower widgets, or those taking a long time to load, at the end of your download cycle.

4. Compress your pictures.

Most people think because they use small pictures, these automatically take little time to download. Not necessarily so. It depends on the data-size (kbytes) of your picture.

Check your pictures by right-clicking on them and select ‘Properties’.
A typical 400 x 300 pixel picture should not take more than 20-40 kbyte. Often people use > 100 kbyte. A couple of those pictures and your download speed will be a killer.

I use Picasa, a free picture library and processing tool that lets you export pictures with predefined pixel size, quality and compression rate. The visual quality of compressed Picasa pictures is very good.

Pay particular attention to your banner: because banners are often larger than normal pictures, and is the first thing your page will download (and the first thing the users will see), compressing it is critical (The Road’s banner is 12 Kbyte, as an example). There is nothing as frustrating for a user than to sit and wait for a banner to download.

5. Limit your widgets

This has been a killer for me. I loved to add little gimmicks – “widgets”, that showed the ‘latest visitors’, or “the weather where I am”, or “the latest comments”, or “all countries of the latest visitors”, etc..

That killed my speed. I could see so, when using Mozilla’s Firefox to download my page, and to observe what Firefox was waiting for (check the bottom left of the Firefox window)…

Recommendations:
a. Limit the number of of gimmicks and widgets
b. Delete those widgets which are slow
b. Those which are slow, and you really really wanted to keep, put at the bottom of your page (or whatever part of your page which downloads last – see point two).

6. Store widget and badge icons on your picture server

Often, widgets or badges (like this one ) come by default with the “img” link to an icon stored by the service you are referring to.

I had a lot of these on my site (e.g. in the syndication part at the bottom of my page), and found out that in average at least one of these services would be down or slow, thus slowing down MY page…

The remedy is to store these icons on your trusted image server (e.g. Picasa or Flickr).

How?
1. You rightclick on the icon as you have it on your page
2. Choose ‘Save as’
3. Then upload that image to your picture server
4. In the “IMG” tag, replace the URL of the picture with the one on your picture server.

7. Limit or speed up RSS feeds

I RSS feeds to show the latest news bulletins or to display the latest comments on my blog. Feeds take some time to download, and not all servers are fast.

The speed of my site increased quite a bit when I moved the feeds onto Newsgator, a free feed service. They are fast and reliable. You can quite easily combine your feeds with free Yahoo Pipes.

Have fun!

Picture courtesy vintage-poster.info

With the help several people, I spend a lot of time collecting and updating my list of nonprofit blogs, which I publish on my Delicious list. Over the past months, this list grew to 549 blogs.

As quantity, but also quality is important, I use strict selection criteria:

1. I only accept blogs, not mere websites
2. The blogs have to be at least 3 months old, and have regular updates
3. Blogs without updates for six months are deleted
4. The subject has to revolve around the nonprofit sector: advocacy, fundraising, charity, development, aid, humanitarian relief…

I aggregate the latest posts via RSS feeds, and republish summaries of these blogs on The NonProfit Blogs and the NonProfit Blogs section of Humanitarian News. Both now collect a total of about 490 RSS feeds. The updates are automatically twittered via @nonprofitblogs.

As time went by, this must have become the largest single collection of nonprofit blogs you can find on the Web.

The reason why I collect these blogs:

1. They give me, at a glance, an overview of what is going on in the nonprofit world
2. Storing summaries of these blogs, gives me (and you) a searchable historic overview of what people write about in the nonprofit sector
3. Going over the bloglist allows me to analyse statistics on the blogs, as I did in this post
4. And most importantly, I collect them to learn from others: scanning through the list, and looking at the blogs, gives me a good impression what tools others use, what the common failures and successes are, the common pitfalls. It allows me to pick up basic lessons, as I described in this post on “blog real estate”.

I hope you find some inspiration for your own blog, using this nonprofit blogs list. Enjoy!

Cartoon courtesy We Blog Cartoons

Yahoo Pipes is a free Internet service by Yahoo, which allows you to aggregate and manipulate RSS feeds. I use them extensively for several of my aggregation sites like Humanitarian News and AidNews, to name a few.

Recently, Yahoo Pipes silently went from “Beta” to “Production”, a migration which was only noticed as the word “Beta” disappeared from their logo.

Let me correct that statement: when they went from “Beta” to “Production”, the only thing the users could notice was that their service became unreliable. Since about four weeks, users have been complaining on the Pipes discussion forum about problems saving and running their “pipes”.

Several Pipes staff are monitoring the discussion forum, and have been putting out messages in the gist of “we had a problem, but all is fixed now”, but other than that, there has been silence.

Which makes me think: how far have we, the Internet community, become reliant on free services like Pipes, or Google Apps, Google Gmail, Blogger, Flickr, Picasa, etc.. And how far do we have a say on “our rights as a consumer”?

It is not because an Internet giant like Yahoo puts out a service free for all to use, that the service is to be taken “as is”. Where are our not a “consumers’ rights” in all of this? Are we not lured into the free services, because the services are free, and when we become reliant and dependent on them, understaffed as they might be, we just “cope” with the down time? Have we, as consumers, become reluctant to demand our rights? And what is the forum of to do that?

Think of it. How many organisations, if not companies, use free Internet services provided by the “Giants”. What is our say when these services go down? What are our rights? How much longer will we cope with their downtime by saying “oh… but it is for free, so we have no right to complain?”.

Nothing is for free in this world. If a company decides to provide a certain service “for free”, than there is a certain reason for it. Either because they want our contents, they want us to develop applications based on their platforms,… But it does not mean because services are for free they should be unreliable.

This is the time to demand to these companies a certain acceptable level of service. We need to demand the right to be informed.

Yahoo Pipes: your service sucks at this moment. Get your act together!