I write this blog for you – my loyal readers! To this end, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into what people want, and it seems that there are a few things that keep cropping up that I need to address.
Before I get onto that though, did you catch my earlier post on how to get a free ad on John’s Tech Blog? Time’s running out on this, so I’d urge you to read the post right now before it’s too late!
Anyway, back to what my readers want! 
It turns out that there are a couple of things which I do here that can really annoy people (sorry!). They are:
- Having links that open in a new Window
- Publishing an RSS feed which only contains a summary of every post
Let’s look at each one in more detail.
Links Open in New Window
My thinking behind this was that links to external sites should always be in an new window so that I wouldn’t lose visitors. Guess what though, you know how a ‘back’ button works! On top of this, if I’m doing my job and delivering good quality content on a consistent basis, you’ll keep coming back just because of the value that I get out of my site!
My goal now is to stop creating links which open in new Windows, and over time I’ll also remove any other links that I find around the site that still do (like the ad’s on the right, for example). Please bear with me whilst I make this change, and in the meantime, I’m sorry!!!
RSS Feed Only Contains Summary
This one wasn’t so obvious to track down! I noticed that I seemed to be losing subscribers to my feed almost as quickly as I was gaining new ones, so I started digging. It struck me as odd that whilst every other feed that I subscribe to myself ave me a full feed, my own was always truncated. I figured that was due to me being too tight to pay for some form of RSS feed publishing service, but then I spotted the option. The ‘Reading’ option. The default ‘For every article in a feed, show summary‘ option!
Doh!
So this option has now been corretly set to ‘Full text‘ and subscribers should start seeing what they were expecting. If this has been affecting you, again, I’m sorry!!!!
If there’s anything else that’s annoying you about John’s Tech Blog, please comment below. If not, why not subscribe via one of the RSS links on the top right of the page, or ‘Fave This Blog’ on Technorati using the green button in the top right-hand corner!
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Speaking for myself (who else would I be speaking for?) I’ll have to say that I can’t stand links opening in the same window if they’re external. I don’t want to use a back back back button if I’ve found something on a link that I want to keep exploring.
Regardless of how many ‘website experts’ I’ve heard say ‘no blank targets’ in my life, I don’t give a flying farg how expert they think they are – I’m putting new windows onto external sites. My own links are internal. I’ve heard the argument that, if they want something to open in a new window they’ll right click and choose open in a new tab, but I’m still not making anybody go back and back and back to get back to my site.