7 things I did on my blog, to make it a better place to read

Readability & accessibility for a blog is very important.  You need to give few good reasons to your reader to bring them on your blog site. Today, when technology is really advanced we need to re-look our blog website & think of few additional things.  This blog has all those 7 things, which I am going to discuss. I consider my blog most accessible in all forms. Good theme for readability, easy to share, optimized for speed, accessible on mobile, user can choose to translate in his language & last but not the least user can choose to listen its content.

1. Choose better theme.
This is most basic thing. Clean and neat theme on a blog is very important. White background with black colour text is most appropriate theme.  Do not put too much of flashy advertisements or flashy content, they not only distract & confuse your readers; they also slow down the loading time. This article might help you to choose better theme.

2. Make it easy to share & comment.
Blogging is a form of social media. It’s very important to have better interactivity with your readers.  Comment form must be having various options; user should not be forced to login to put comment. Yes, if don't want any unwanted content to be posted by your readers, your can go for “comment approval” option.
These days’ people love to share blogs on various channels. Add buttons like addthis, dzone, tweetmeme(blogger, wordpress) digg(blogger, wordpress) etc to make it easy to share.

3. Optimize for speed.
Adding to much of buttons, poor theme and gadgets might slow down loading time of your blog site. Here are 3 things you can do to improve performance.

i. Put all unobtrusive scripts at the bottom of page.
As you know most of the gadgets and buttons are based on JavaScript. Adding too much of buttons and gadgets might slow down loading time of your blog.

Any JavaScript block, freezes the loading of rest of the content till complete JavaScript code is not loaded. So you can effectively bring readable content much early, by putting most of the JavaScript blocks at the bottom of the page. Question is how can you decide, what can be kept at the bottom of the page? Any script which only executes when entire webpage is loaded can be brought the bottom of the page. In more technical terms any unobtrusive code can be kept at the bottom of the page.

ii. Use CDN (for better loading time) .
One way to get free CDN is “Google’ App Engine”. Read this article.

iii. Run tests like Yslow or Page Speed.
YSlow and PageSpeed are a plug-ins for Firefox (on top of Firebug). These plug-ins can run a test on websites and can tell you what can be optimized.  They will provide huge list, though you can not achieve all of them easily but if you even achieve 50% of them your website will be much faster than any webpage. If you really want to see most optimized web page see yahoo home page. They have lots of content on the website but still loading surprisingly low.

4. Automated podcast (sometime listening is better).
If you are kind of guy, who write long descriptive content, automated podcasting feature might help your reader to have an option to “listen” rather reading it. Odiogo gives free automated way to get podcast of your blog text. It has built-in text-2-speech feature, which will narrate your blog.

5. Automatically Translatable.
Automated translation might not help a lot, but can be really handy for foreign users. Use Google Translate widget on your blog so that user can easily translate.

6. Mobile readable.
Many people prefer to do blog reading on their mobile. There is an easy way to create mobile version of your website. You can use Mobify, to get mobile version of your blog. Getting mobile version is easy; you can get it in 3 easy steps.

7. Add some fun.
On my blog you can drag those sidebar gadgets, such kind of functionality can help reader to play with your blog.

Thanks for reading, Love to see your comments.