A lot of bloggers live for the comments left by readers on their posts. While not all bloggers may not feel this way, it cannot be denied that comments can make a blogger’s day – positive comments, at least. However, there are always two sides to a coin, and if you get positive comments, you are sure to get negative ones as well. What do you do when you see these negative comments? How do you deal with them?
Before we take a look at the answers, let us make one thing clear: it is one thing for people to leave comments expressing their disagreement with what you said; it is another thing for people to leave negative comments which are not at all constructive. Needless to say, it is the second kind that we are talking about in this post.
So, what do you do when you see those kinds of comments in your blog? You have two simple choices: to reply or to ignore.
Reply.
If you do decide to reply, you can do so via the comments section or via private message or e-mail. Whichever mode you choose, it is important to bear in mind that you should never rise to the bait. Oftentimes, people who leave “destructive” comments are merely trying to get your goat anyway. Nothing will come out of replying in a similar fashion. The best thing you can do is to reply in a civil, even friendly, manner. You might be surprised at how a little kindness can go a long way! Here’s a nice guest post over at Problogger to help you more with this tactic.
Ignore.
Alternatively, you can choose to simply ignore the comment. Even better, if the comment is really bad and not constructive in the least bit, hit that delete button! You do not want your other readers to feel put off because of someone who feels like trolling your blog, do you?
Time for your input – what do you do when you get these kinds of comments?
Photo via yoshiffles
As Facebook grew bigger and bigger, so did the issues surrounding it. Perhaps one of the biggest issues that the giant social network has always faced is just how secure it is. Left and right, we continue to hear about privacy issues, and how users have a lot to fear in this regard.
Recently, however, founder Mark Zuckerberg gleefully announced a host of new features that they are rolling out – features that are supposed to ensure the privacy of Facebook users. One would think that this just might put an end to all the concerns – NOT.
Even more recently, news about several popular Facebook applications giving away private information to advertisers. Zynga, the group behind the ubiquitous FarmVille and Mafia Wars, and LOLapps are among the platform developers that have been earmarked for the privacy breach. The official statement is that the leaking of private information was due to “technical details,” and that everything was accidental. Did we really expect them to say otherwise?
To give credit to Facebook, they admitted the breach, and say that they are taking steps to address similar issues coming up. Then again, isn’t this what press releases are for? Are the guys at Facebook really taking serious steps to solve security issues? Will the new features actually make access more secure for the average user?
Here are some of the new features that are supposed to make this so:
- Ability to remotely log out of Facebook: “Under the Account Security section of your Account Settings page you’ll see all of your active sessions, along with information about each session. In the unlikely event that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can also shut down the unauthorized login before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer.”
- Temporary passwords: These are to be used when accessing Facebook in unsecure locations. “Simply text “otp” to 32665 on your mobile phone (U.S. only), and you’ll immediately receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. In order to access this feature, you’ll need a mobile phone number in your account.”
Check out Jake Brill’s blog post for more details.
As for the effectiveness of these features, we will just have to see in the coming weeks and months. Personally, I haven’t had the chance to use them!
Photo via pcworld.com.ph
I have a problem. I have too much stuff going on in my life that it is getting difficult to manage it all. So I figure that all of you professionals out there who have their lives in order (anyone?) could help me out some.
I own 3 desktop computers, 1 laptop, a Sidekick, a Blackberry and many other gadgets. How can I better manage my life? The technology is there, but the common sense seems to be missing or something.
Keith’s To-Done has been helping me out some, but I am looking for more and in the process of looking I am missing out on getting work done. My biggest problem is email. It was discussed in the comments of freelancing traits how important it is to respond to emails. I am horrible at this. I receive anywhere from 150-300 non-spam emails a day. Obviously I can’t respond to all of them and still get all my work done and maintain some type of social life.
So how do you manage it all?
To follow up on my post concerning your Knowledge Portfolio I thought it would be nice to gather what you find to be the essential books that any programmer or designer should have. Here is what I have come up with so far.
How about you?
During my stint as a web developer in the corporate world and my short stint as a freelance web designer I found that I would ask myself frequently if I could do design/development every single day for the rest of my life. The answer was always yes, if I could just do it on my own without having to worry about outside influences (aka clients). I always dreamed of an utopia where you could have fun designing and programming without any stress at all. The only criticism laid upon your work was the criticism placed by yourself.
I know that some designers/developers are able to enjoy all of their clients and all the work that they do. How do they do it? I have no idea, because I know that I was never even close to that. Once you invite a client in to pay the bills you lose a part of that freedom. Some clients wish to take all of that freedom away from you and those are the ones that you just don’t deal with.
The reason I say that you lose part of your freedom is because you aren’t painting a piece of art to be auctioned off to someone who happens to like your style (unless you do template design), but you are mixing your design tastes with that of the client. That’s where part of your freedom goes.
That’s why personal site design is so important. Every designer/developer needs her playground to experiment and have fun with. You can see it here on Whitespace every single day almost. I am on design #46 I believe for this site. The design moves along with my tastes for the moment and I get to see what works and what doesn’t. Many would argue that constantly changing the design can turn your readers off. This may certainly be the case, but no offence to your readers, at times you have to look out for your own happiness.
I believe if you want to do design your whole life there has to be a part of your day, week, month, year that you devote to your own work. Try your best to filter out what other’s will think of it and focus on how you feel about it. Hell, you don’t have to make every site you do a public one. Create a section that is just for you and have at it.
Even when you do this though, you can get burnt out from work, whether it be the corporate world or demanding clients. What keeps you going? How close have you been to just saying fuck it and moving on to something else? Can you do design your whole life?
A common entry you see on many web design blogs is the one where people are looking for inspiration when getting ready to tackle a new design. While I don’t advise looking at other sites before you begin to design your own, for some people this works really well. What I never see though is people recommending any Flash sites to look at. I wonder if most CSS/XHTML designers still hold a grudge (or whatever you wish to call it) against Flash sites because many of them still are nightmarish to say the least.
For example I love to look at 2advanced or Joshua Davis from an information design perspective (along with a visual design perspective) and see how I can learn from them. Granted most Flash sites I come across serve absolutely no purpose on the web, but I think if more designers open their minds to checking out the good ones then their designer inspiration toolbox will become that much more valuable.
Whether you are starting a project or a company do you really want it to grow fast? Do you want to try and control a beast running wild? Far too many of us envision a quick start and a happy finish, but rarely do you see that today. Once that momentum builds up, keeping it is a lot harder than getting it initially.
Seth Godin wrote about overnight successes and if you follow the 37signals’ philosophy you know that they believe its much better to make your mistakes while under the radar than when you make it. The problem is that in this type of aggressive environment not becoming big quick can become discouraging.
With 9rules we had a very slow and steady growth and have made a number of mistakes basically because we don’t have another blueprint to follow. We know what we want to do and we have a feeling that what we are doing is right, but we can not be totally sure because it has never been done in our space before so there are bound to be some hiccups. However, every single time we walkaway feeling a bit stronger while learning something new.
If we would’ve blown up at the rate of Digg I don’t think I would have been able to handle it. I can’t speak for my partners, but I know the thought is cool and everything, however I would have to buy a new set of boxers everyday if that event occurred. Now that we have been around for over a year I much more prepared to handle challenges and have a better understanding of the overall picture and that definitely couldn’t have happened by getting big fast.
Think of the new freelance designer who takes on more projects than he realized he could handle. Think of the new music group that experiences overnight success only to disappear by their next album. The athlete with a superior rookie season that can’t be matched his sophomore year.
I know that we can’t always control how fast we grow, but we can control what we wish for so if I were you I would think twice before asking for that huge overnight success. Take your time and let things marinate, it usually works out better in the long run that way.
I think Rundle would appreciate this list more than me, but I can definitely go along with it.
- When your markup is readable by humans
- When your functionality degrades gracefully
- When you can increase the text size willy nilly and it doesn’t break your layout
- When your site works in Internet Explorer without you trying
- When your site’s hierarchy is hierarchical even without your stylesheet
- When your url structure makes sense
- When you make a really awesome form
- When the client says “this is great, this is exactly what we wanted” and you agree
Friday I said I believe your message is the most important aspect of your site to keep in mind when designing it. For me, the second most important issue is your audience. When designing a site it might be easy to say that you are designing for everyone, but you must realize that every site serves a specific audience.
When I say this I do not mean generic audiences like single white males age 20-35. What I mean are specific types of audiences. For this site I perceived my audience to be web designers and others who may have some interest in design or programming for websites. This along with my message helped me to develop the design of the site. I realized that most designers work with resolutions above 800×600 and so I made just a little bit wider than that. Content wise, I know I have to bring something different to the table to attract readers because there are plenty of other well-established design blogs out there and I also know what kind of style and tone is allowed. Finally, I knew that most designers would respect a minimalist site because they would also see the usability involved along with the design and understand that it is not easy designing something simple that is different. Once you have figured out your intended audience (besides “everybody”) then you can have a better idea of how you should structure your site.
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The message. This will always be the most important element of any design that you do. The message that your design gives will resonate through the minds of your users. If your design delivers your intended message then you have succeeded. If your design supercedes your message and hides it, then the design has failed.
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