10 things every [new] blogger should avoid!

1. Don't play with the font

Most of the blog engines will provide something called "Cascaded style sheet" (CSS) which simply means. They take care of the Size, color and the shape of the font for you. Every time you make a change the result might not be very good. And if you decide to change your theme sometime in the future. You might end up with White text on White background. So try to never play with the fonts.

2. Huge Picture sizes

This is one of the most reoccurring mistake by many new bloggers. They upload a nice high resolution picture to help them represent their thoughts. What they don't know is that it will take 2 minutes to download on people's computers and people generally will lose interest and just leave. The solution? Open your pictures in any photo manipulation software and resize it. Also reduce the quality while saving it to make it smaller in size. I like Paint.Net and Google's Picasa. I'm sure there are many others.

3. Copy and paste with crap

This is another case where many people seem to fall in the trap of copy and paste. So you want to add material from another site, or from a document you created in Word. The problem here is that these will come with something called "Markup" which are some additional tags that specify font details and other junk that is not needed. So what do you do? You need to strip your text from all this markup and to do this, you can copy your text, paste it in notepad (the tool that come with windows) then copy it once again, and only then paste it back in your articles, clean from markup.

4. Broken links back to yourself

Another very common mistakes is broken links. Many people like to link to others. But when they do that they forget to add the HTML prefix http:// what this symbol means is that this is a website that you will use the HTML transfer protocol to reach. But forgetting this prefix (http://) most of the time will give the current editor to make a guess where this link goes to. Most of the time it thinks that you want to link to a local page and adds the prefix (http://yoursitename.yourblogengine.com) and THEN adds your link. At this stage it will be completely broken

5. hot linking

Hot linking is the act of taking pictures from other sites and posting them in your articles. It's VERY bad. Because it uses the other site's bandwidth, so people get very upset about that. And there is no guarantee that the picture will not change address. In fact if you hot link to any page on Imdb (the movie database) you can guarantee that it will be gone in less than a week. So spare yourself and others the trouble

6. Copyrighted materials

It's a serious offense to reproduce any copyrighted material without it's owners consent. Make no mistake, people might prosecute you over their intellectual property and they will win. So books, news clippings, pictures and other material that shouldn't be reproduced (movies, songs ...etc) do not belong on your blog. The least common sense says, if you do it, don't advertise it

7. Delete your blog

It's inevitable that many times you will be frustrated and you will decide to delete your blog. Remember it took you months, or even years to establish your blog. Deleting it is a huge thing that you need to be prepared to do. An alternative is to just shut it down.

8. Embedded auto-play music

This is one of the most annoying features in any blog. People get really upset of it. Remember people might be in meetings, have the volume really loud or just don't share the same taste of music that you have. Be courteous and don't force your taste of music on your readers

9. Neglecting your blog or readers

Neglect is the cancer of any blog. People will start going away, your links will start getting dropped and eventually people will move on and forget about you.

Also remember to answer your comments and do maintain your blog, remove all the "You're blog is awesome" spam. Make sure you are not a hub for spammers

10. No titles!

Titles are VERY important, don't ever publish a post without adding a title to it. It's very important it means a lot and it allows people to distinguish between what they want to read and what they don't want to read. Even if you add something like "Untitled" it's better than no titles at all.

So there you have it... enjoy blogging, hopefully these tips will help you out