This is actually part of a blog improvement meme just started by my long-time online friend Dane, and whilst I haven’t taken part in any kind of meme for months, I believe this to be a really valuable one which has the potential to give lots of value to readers, though I am twisting it slightly by trying to ask the people I am pinging to also give me an answer to what I want to change.

I am also going to tag some big hitters, and hope they will respond.

Headline Formatting

For a while I have been puzzling over something as to the best approach in formatting headines, but so that they appear differently on a blog, and in an RSS feed.

Here is an example from Copyblogger

The original article was about high impact content above the fold, and headlines make a huge difference, especially how they are formatted.

Notice that the first line is quite short? That isn’t normal wrapping, it is centred, but also includes a “BR” in the headline.

<a href="http://www.copyblogger.com/writing-for-stumbleupon/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Writing for StumbleUpon:&lt;br /&gt; High Impact Content “Above the Scroll” in Four Easy Steps">Writing for StumbleUpon:<br> High Impact Content “Above the Scroll” in Four Easy Steps</a>

But the sneaky thing is that that BR only seems to appear on the page, and not in feed readers or search results. I have tried just including it when adding a headline to a post in the past, and the headline looked horrible in feed readers, and when people submit your post to Digg, the ugly “BR” can appear in the title… oops.

I can think of a number of ways to do this, such as using a custom field for the headline on the page being displayed, but I would love to know how it is being done on Copyblogger.

So first up I am pinging Brian Clark or Chris Pearson to give us some insight on the best way to handle this. Chris did Brian’s design and has covered similar stuff such as image handling in RSS in the past.

I think improving how headlines are displayed is important, so would make a perfect article on either site. I would also love to know what they would prefer.

Subscription Options

I have been experimenting with quite unique subscription options on this site for a while, and wrote about how I did it.
The aim was to raise the headers up the page a little on the single pages and offer something totally unique, and in many ways it has worked.
Some people might be happy to double their subscribers in 3 months.

It has however totally failed in one regard. My email subscription rate has absolutely plummeted.
I am not sure if this is to be expected, and that RSS usage really is increasing, or because I am just attracting a more sophisticated user, but I suspect it is because it is hidden.

I would make it a lot more prominent if I was able to offer an incentive for signing up with a managed email solution, but such a solution would need to

1. Allow me to send a full content daily digest automatically
2. Support integration with membership sites
3. subscription management (such as moving from a prospect to a customer list, and not sending out multiple emails to people subscribed to 2 different lists)
4. Subscriber numbers are addictive – I need them reported to Feedburner

I want to extensively test email subscriptions on blogs, but I need the content to go out in the emails once per day. Some days I publish 4 blog entries, other days nothing at all. My record was 10 blog posts in a single day. If someone received 10 emails from me in one day, they are going to unsubscribe before they have read the 6th.

The nearest to the functionality that I am aware about is Aweber, but I believe I can only select a number of posts to send in a batch, or immediate sending.
So I am going to ping the guys at Aweber about this, but I would also love them to write something on how to increase email subscriptions on blogs.

There would be lots of ways I could offer incentives for email subscriptions, but I don’t want to frighten my list if I have a busy day.

Messing With WordPress Loops

In the new design I will most likely use some kind of featured post format, but I am not sure about the best way to do it for server load.

I have read 2 very good solutions

• Use Daniel’s plugin, Homepage Excerpts or modify it as needed – this filters the output of the standard loop
• Dane’s single wordpress loop code which does some counting to determine what to display
• Using 2 or more WordPress loops

I will probably have to use some multiple loop code anyway in various places, and this will mainly be used for categories, but I would love to know which method is the ideal one to recommend to people.

So I need to ping a WordPress Guru who knows how these things work, and might also have helped implement similar things on a few high traffic sites. Aaron… help!

Aaron has actually been doing some pretty hefty changes to his own blog, and I noticed that the front page has been optimized to drive subscriptions very much to other team B5 blogs.

Also, in the comments on Digg recently for the article I linked to I noticed lots of comments regarding performance issues. Were they WordPress 2.3 related?

Just 3 For Now

There are lots of other things I am going to be improving, but I generally know the answers for those. I am actually going to experiment with a wide 2 column theme (60/40) with a complex footer.

I have been using tagging to determine related posts and WP2.3 probably won’t have that available for while.

And so gentleman, I would really appreciate your answers, and maybe you would also like to discuss what you would like to change on your blogs, or try to shoehorn some answers out of other people.

I hadn’t been following the news for a couple of days, so I popped over to one of my old haunts, The Register to see if there was anything I should know about. Occasionally, especially if I visit The Register early morning in Europe, I can pick up some interesting fresh stories that are fairly exclusive, or have some different angles.

I was greeted with this story about Wikipedia:-

Great story (scandal and controversy), hot subject (Wikipedia), pretty naff headline (“Farewell, Wikipedia?”)

In fact the headline wasn’t a total disaster, it caught my eye, maybe because it could also suggests an end to Wikipedia itself, but maybe that suggestion is a bit subtle.

So I highlighted the very clear “comment” paragraph and hit my “Ultimate Digg Bookmarklet”

Ultimate Digg Bookmarklet?

javascript:(function(){x='http://digg.com/remote-submit?phase=2%20&url='+location.href+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);if(document.getSelection()){x=x+'&bodytext='+encodeURIComponent(document.getSelection())};setTimeout(%22y.focus()%22,1000);y=window.open(x,'digger','width=650,height=450,toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,scrollbars=yes')})()

I couldn’t get this to display correctly as a dragable link
I picked this up some time ago in the comments on a blogspot blog, you can probably find it if you search hard enough – supposedly it works in all browsers, and not only picks up the URL and Title, but also the story paragraph you highlight and outputs it in a popup window. It is very useful.

I decided to just use the “comment” paragraph for my headline and story description, and forget the original title.

I ended up with the following:-

24 Year Old Fake Wikipedia Professor Forced To Step Down?

After pressure over the weekend from Wikipedia’s Il Duce Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia’s most illustrious fake professor Ryan Jordan has resigned his post at Wikia Inc.

I did add one small detail from the original title that just seemed to add a little more curiosity… a question mark “?”

I hadn’t read the whole article in depth, and there could have been a good reason for The Register’s use of the question mark in their title.

The Power Of ?

All I did was submit a story I thought was good, seemed to be original from a reputable source, and which might be of interest to people on Digg.

A couple of hours later it was up to 5 Diggs, and I also noticed a number of similar stories that had quite a few more Diggs. Doing a little searching I discovered the story had been breaking over a number of days. With my submission effectively the same story, though with different commentary, I didn’t expect it to get much reaction.

I am not a top Digg user, and had never had a story promoted before. I have a few friends on Digg, but we are talking 10s, not 100s or even 1000s.

16 hours later I was again browsing through Digg, mainly to see if there were any interesting comments on a story about StumbleUpon I had digged (it is a really good guide).

I was actually extremely shocked when presented with this:-

As of this writing the story is still live on Digg, it hasn’t been buried.

I Am Not A Copywriter

If this story was being written by Brian over at CopyBlogger or maybe Michel Fortin then they would probably be able to tell you why that particular headline was successful.

I counted at least 20 maybe 30 stories on the same subject, and those were just the ones that didn’t get buried. I am sure The Register being looked upon as a credible source helped, but lots of credible sources were reporting on the same story, and many of the headlines I have seen were very similar, but without one small detail.

?

It wasn’t until I started reading the comments on the Digg story that I realised why the story might have been Digged, though honestly it wasn’t something that was “engineered for success”. All I did was submit a story…

Half the comments were actually related to the question mark, such as

Why is there a question mark in the title?

Hes copying fox news with the question mark. Adds mystery and intrigue hehe.

and many others…

So did one character turn a 4 day old news story into a front page Digg?

Here is how an H2 Headline looks on this blog currently, without any additional special CSS that you would expect for special things like post titles.

This is how an H3 Headline currently looks on this blog

There is a slight difference but very small.

However I have made a tough decision today

Stop Using H2 For Subheadlines Within Posts

At least only use them for very short headlines for a specific emphasis.

Why H2 Headlines are Bad

A huge and growing proportion of blog readers are subscribers, and their first impression of each piece of your content is within their feed reader.

How your content is displayed is in the hands of the feedreader developers.

First of all I should note that this does not affect post titles. They are universally handled in a different way.

Here is what I saw today that helped me

Here is what H2 titles can look like in the Feedburner management screen

Here is what H3 titles can look like in the Feedburner management screen

Now it should be noted that view of my RSS feed is never seen by the public. However I have seen many sites that use H2 headings that large.

Feed Readers

Let’s take a look at how this looks in Google reader

H2 Headlines in Google Reader

H3 Headlines in Google Reader

H2 Headlines in Pageflakes

H3 Headlines in Pageflakes

Pageflakes handle H2 by adding a page wide underscore and additional space under the headline rather than a massive increase in display size compared to H3.

Lets take a look at H2 in Bloglines

Here is Bloglines H3 Headline

It should be noted that Bloglines alternates backgrounds for the posts.

Bloglines differentiates H2 and H3 using colour more than size, though H2 is slightly larger. It should also be noted that H3 in Bloglines looks exactly the same as a post title.

A reader of Bloglines would typically focus on post headlines more than content headlines, thus it is my opinion it is better to have subheadings that look like post titles.

Want to be sneaky? I haven’t tested this but if you make every subheading a clickable link back to your original post you might have more click-troughs. To achieve this you would have to work out your post URL in advance. Hmm, another idea for my plugin list.

Email

Lots of people subscribe to blogs by email. In fact on many blogs this may be as many as 50% of subscribers, so it is important how your blog is presented.

Lets take a look at Gmail (after being sent by Feedburner)

This is a H2 heading

This is a h3 headline

Feedburner in their email preferences does give you specific control of post headlines and body text. They do not give you control of other elements such as heading tags.

My feeling is that with a basic H2 tag in gmail, a long sub-headline is going to look very messy.

Retro fixed formatting?

It would be possible to use fixed font sizes for all your content, but in my opinion that is a backwards step.

Conclusion

It is important to think about how your content will look where your reader will read it.

It is my belief that H2 is more likely to be defined with an excessively large font than H3 if your content is picked up for syndication on another site.

Current feed reader CSS settings are such that unless you apply a custom CSS modification to your browser for a particular site, H2 could be ugly.
In the case of Bloglines, there could be an advantage using H3 hyperlinks for all your subheadings, if you could work out post URLs before you publish.

Things like heading sizes in the content you read are subjective, but based on my own research as above, I am going to switch to using H3 headlines for most of my blog content.