Monday, November 27, 2006

A Red-Letter Day for BoingBoing?

I shouldn't be amused by this, but I am: Here's a graphic illustration of why you should always, always check your content on the live site after you publish it. This includes after making any changes to published content:

Red text on boingboing due to an unclosed font tag
 Apparently, Cory Doctorow (or someone updating his entry on the Make-magazine edition Leatherman tool) forgot to close a font tag, so all the non-link text is red from that point on. It finally stops when it hits another font tag.

For most of us personal bloggers, unclosed tags, silly typos, broken links and the like are just a minor inconvenience. They make us look sloppy, but since we have relatively few readers (who probably know us personally, to boot), they should be willing to cut us some slack.

Then again, if you don't get many readers, it's a case for not annoying the ones you get, isn't it?

However, for the folks on the high side of the long tail (to say nothing of, say, the #2 blog in the Technorati Top 100), silly little mistakes like this just make you look bad (no matter what anyone says about the blogosphere norm of "publish, then correct").

Details matter, even if you don't have a anti-site dedicated to you.


(Yes, I know I shouldn't be using a table for this.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is why I use Textile for all my blog posts. It does all the tag closing and formatting stuff for me.

Joelogon said...

I dunno. That seems like cheating to me, somehow.

Actually, with Blogger's limited HTML validation and FF 2.0's inline spellcheck, it makes things a lot easier (especially when you can just toggle between HTML and rich text editing). -- Joe