And there’s a very good reason why.

We start with a new idea, a single objective that the site is going to achieve. But as we progress with the development, we keep adding redundant bits of stuff, and completely unneeded elements.

So as a result, we create something that ends up being too many things, and having so many features it scares everyone away.

Take the social sharing icons on most blogs for example. Some blogs display a huge stack of sharing icons at the end of every post. Such bloat discourages sharing rather than encourage it. The right approach would be to display only what you really know would work. The retweet button anyone?

Next time you embark on a new project:

Think of what annoys you on other sites: and don’t do it on yours just for the sake of following the tradition.

Look at what you have so far: and re-evaluate its usefulness. Is it what the visitors come here looking for?

Don’t lose focus: don’t try to make your site do too many things. The more focused the objective, the better.

Simplify, not complicate: keeping things simple and intuitive is the way to go. The less steps your visitors have to take to get to the info/tool they need, the better.

Now, I don’t want to get redundant here myself. So I’ll let you mull over the above points.

And please, add your thoughts below.

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OK, first of all I’m sorry for disappearing from the face of blogosphere all of a sudden. I made a few posts in past couple of months to make a comeback, but things didn’t go as expected. But I do promise to stick around this time and do what I love doing: sharing what I know about blogging on this very blog. (For more on what’s going on in my life, and to chat with me, follow me on Twitter)

With that aside, I’m once again, and as always, excited by the spanking new release of WordPress with a shiny new backend.

WordPress was good and well before it switched to the new backend interface with the release of 2.5. WordPress 2.5 looked sexy, but it wasn’t all too usable.

Although I dislike having to use a completely revamped backend every couple of months, WordPress developers have taken a step in the right direction this time. WordPress 2.7 is here to right the wrongs of 2.5, so to speak.

There are plenty of new features and improvements in WordPress 2.7. Here are the best ones, without further ado.

WordPress upgrader

WordPress core upgrader eliminates the biggest annoyance of upgrading WordPress manually. There’s a Plugin around that can upgrade your WordPress installation with a few clicks, but nothing beats the in-built ease of upgrade, right?

You can access the upgrader by navigating to Tools > Upgrade.

Side navigation

This should have been done earlier. It’s just impossible to manage all the links and menus in top navigation bar. But well, better late than never.

The side navigation is not only more usable, intuitive, and good looking, it also gives you access to various submenus with just one click thanks to the new expandable navigation. Expand and collapse the menus as you see fit!

Dashboard and Post editor

Rearrange the panels on Dashboard and in post editor with good ol’ drag and drop. This is such a time saver. You keep only the important stuff handy, and still have all other goodies docked off-screen for one-click access.

There are plethora of other features that you can find by digging deeper into the menus. So have fun discovering the new WordPress goodness.

What do you like most in WordPress 2.7?

P.S. aren’t they trying too hard to make the backend look like Mac OS X?

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So for now, in order to keep things fresh, I’m opening the doors of Blogging Bits to guest bloggers.

If you want to reach 700+ subscribers, send me your post or post idea to the.syed {at} gmail.com. If your post is published, you’ll be given proper credit at the start of the post with a permanent link to your blog. Or we can discuss the detail in email.

Thank you for your interest, and thank you for being a reader of Blogging Bits!

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Do you make money blogging? I, for one, don’t.

It may seem like a a strange question, but do you really blog for money? Will you stop blogging if you don’t make money with your blog?

When I started this blog, I wanted to make money from it. But slowly, as time passed, my perspective changed. My blog became my identity, and people who read me (yes, you!) became my friends.

Now I don’t blog for money. I blog just to share my take on different issues in internet marketing, blogging, and web design world. And I really love doing it.

Note: I’m not averse to money. And I certainly wouldn’t reject it if a money making opportunity arises!

In my observation, most bloggers start blogging for money, but as time passes and they don’t make more than a few pennies, they either give up, or persist – just for the fun of it!

Those who persevere, gain new insights into their target market, and actually find out how to monetize their blog, directly or indirectly. Those are the ones who really make money blogging, and become an inspiration for a new generation of bloggers.

Well, see, I’m still here. And I don’t make money from blogging (though in my case, it’s intentional). I’m in the second phase of blogging.

Now the real question (and please answer) Do you make money blogging? What phase are you in? How long have you been blogging? Do you plan to keep on blogging no matter what?

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Blogging and misc

Using Trends In Google Reader To Manage RSS Overload by Abhijeet

To Tweet or Not to Tweet? 50+ Links & Tools by Tad

How Social Proof Can Kill or Fill Your Blog by Jonathon

8 Ways To Add Value With Link Roundup Posts by Tay

How to Show You Care About Your Customers by James

Design

19 Visual Effects That Entertain And Amuse by Brian

A Comparative Study of Logo Design between the 70s and 90s. by Jacob Cass

A Plea From 16 Most Overused Fonts by Vivien

10 tips for writing graphic design briefs by David Airey

45 Photo Editing Tutorials for Photoshop by Steven Snell

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I noticed yesterday that Google, that had been sending me 200+ visitors daily, started pretending as though I didn’t even exist. I can’t figure out why it happened. Maybe it’s just some algorithmic change and I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill, but it’s equally possible that Google thinks I’m selling text link ads.

I’ve been creating web sites for four years, and I know if a site all of a sudden drops from all its rankings, there’s definitely something wrong.

So maybe Google thinks I’m selling links below the deceptively titled heading “Top Commenters”?

It’s not very unlikely as recently some folks have been trying to misuse my Top Commenters list by putting keywords where they should be writing their bloody names.

Right! That’s what you give a good guy in return for him giving his precious readers some link love. I’ve now decided to remove the Top Commenters list so all you spammers can go find yourself.. err.. another good guy?

But losing Google rankings is not the only reason I’ve removed Top Commenters widget.

One quality comment > a lot of useless spammy comments

I’m beyond that phase now when I wanted anyone to comment even if they mildly spammed. It happens. When you start a new blog, you desperately want people to drop by your blog, and want even more desperately to have someone leave you a comment.

However, as a blog evolves, the blogger gains more experience, and realizes the value of having a quality readership, he/she stops caring about numbers alone. Increasing subscriber count and comment count by any means possible aren’t important to them anymore.

Well, I think I no longer welcome useless junk in comments anymore, left only to get some link juice from my blog. I still welcome each and every comment, but if you want to advertise your keywords, please.. here’s the door.

Ah… I feel much better now!

For now, I’m showing my Twitter updates in place of top commenters list. Be sure to follow me on Twitter so we can chat in the best open messenger in the world!

I still feel I should reward all of you who take the time to write comments on Blogging Bits. So if you have a suggestion as to how should I do that, please chime in.

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And it feels great!

OK, so if it sounds too preposterous, I’m not really having sex. But according to Michael Martine (aka Remarkablogger) tweeting is as fun and as unexplainable as having sex.

Last night when I read Michael’s unique view about Twitter, I said to myself, what the heck, why not give Twitter a try and find out if it’s really so addictive? So now, I’m officially joining Twitter.

If you are on Twitter, please follow my tweets.

I’ll write a detailed post about my experience on Twitter when I’ve familiarized myself with how things work on Twitter. In the mean time, if you have good or bad things to say about Twitter, please cough ‘em up in the comments!

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And our life as bloggers, my friends, is about to become a lot easier.

Here are some of the exciting new features as told by Matt:

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting to you? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you.

What’s even cooler is that Jeffery Zeldman is the man behind the dashboard redesign. This explains the way-too-cool new interface WordPress developers couldn’t have put together all by themselves.

More info and download WordPress 2.5 RC1 here.

OK, I usually don’t post about software updates and stuff on Blogging Bits, but WP 2.5 got me so excited I couldn’t resist.

Currently playing with WordPress 2.5 on my local machine.

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I had a post in mind that I kept delaying because I thought my shared hosting plan couldn’t handle the traffic. But since I’ve had many ideas that were taken by other people because I was too lazy to publish them first, I wrote and published this post about StumbleUpon search feature.

The traffic that followed was quite expected. In an hour I had many reviews and thumbs up with thousands of visitors coming my way.

Why was the traffic and great acclaim expected? Simple. Because whenever you write something exclusively about a social media site, in particular if it’s of great practical use, you are rewarded.

So, even though the post itself is quite small, it has got 44 reviews and don’t know how many thumbs-ups so far, making it the most highly-trafficked post on Blogging Bits ever.

The best takeaway point – with great success comes even greater flaming.

I knew that since the post was going to become really hot, I’ll surely be flamed by SU trolls who has nothing but negative comments to add. However, I was curious to see what kind of flame would be thrown my way since the post was actually quite useful, and since I don’t even run ads on my blog, no one would dare call it blogspam.

But the trolls never disappoint you. They always find a reason to find fault with your content.

So, guess what was their excuse for thumbing down the post?

“Boy – you didn’t know about it?” Thumb down.

“I’m amazed people don’t know about it” Thumb down.

Well, you can’t stop ‘em stampeding herds, can you?

What’s been your most popular post on SU and what was it about? Plus, do you get negative reviews on SU often?

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So there is this thing called information overload that threatens to engulf our brains and rob us of our ability to make sound judgments. And there is this internet that helps this giant get even bigger.

If you ask me, this is all bull. Information never comes in such huge quantities that it becomes impossible for us to assimilate it all.

But yes, there is a lot of noise that accompanies the real information and gives us an impression as though it were all endless streams of information.

If you are a regular web surfer, you must have gone through such experiences. You start browsing news sites, blogs, and social news sites and you come across a particularly newish piece of news. You read it on one site and then you move on to the next site. It’s there again. You read it again because it’s written differently.

You move on, but lo and behold, everyone has something to say about it.

Ultimately, you get the impression that there is just too much going on for you to take it all in. And you call it information overload.

But is it for real?

This happens all the time on the internet. Something worth talking about happens, and in an instant the internet masses are busy regurgitating, spreading, and battering it with their full strength.

So this is what it is. The noise overload. Information is still rare, but the noise abounds.

Social media filters out the noise

This is why the wise few have created news and information filters that only let the quality information pass through. It’s called the social media sites.

What I like about social news sites is that they are controlled by the masses themselves. We, the masses, are everywhere, and get to the new information as soon as it’s made available, and post it to social news web sites.

No matter what are your interests, there are social news sites for virtually any topic imaginable. There are even local news sites popping up everywhere, that report what’s new in your town or city.

What I do to get on the top of the information is that I visit the leading social media sites and survey the trends/news/information to see if there is something new worth knowing.

Digg is an excellent place to keep up with the latest happenings in the tech world.

Delicious: about everything that is so cool you’ll want to return to at a later point in time.

Popurls: the most in demand information on the net as gathered by some of the most popular social media sites.

Just some examples.

On more popular social media sites in particular, the community does a great job of voting up the news only from the best sources (mistakes are made, but it’s OK as long as they’re exception rather than the rule).

So if you have been feeling overwhelmed by the information overload, get over it already! Information overload is, in fact, a misnomer.

Embrace the social media to get to the real information whenever it happens, wherever it happens, and spend the rest of your time dong something useful with the information.

Do you agree that information overload doesn’t exist, and that the social media is the best way to reach the information that matters to you?

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