Chris Brogan has some words of wisdom concerning things that far too many people are doing wrong.

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/youre-doing-it-wrong/

Particularly agreeable:

You don’t allow blog comments.

You add people to LinkedIn that you don’t know very well.  (I think this applies even more to Facebook)

You use partial RSS feeds.

You talk in LOLcat speak. (have you ever actually read a comment thread on ICHC?  Inanity defined.)

Some on his list are a little silly

You aren’t using FriendFeed.

You are using FriendFeed.

Sooo…. I should have a FriendFeed account, but I shouldn’t use it?  Or is FriendFeed just altogether wrong?

I’d like to add a few of my own:

You are an artist using Myspace as your primary (only!) homepage.

You are using Myspace.

You insist on using ‘www.’ before every domain name.

You ask a question on a message board, find a solution, publicly declare that you’ve found a solution, but don’t post the solution.

You’ve added 2 dozen applications to your Facebook profile, taking care to invite me to every one of those applications.

You top-post your replies.

You reply-all without reason. (anyone else ever notice Facebook doesn’t even give you the option to reply to the sender only?)

NO FACEBOOK!  BAD!

Ultimately, of course, I agree with Chris Brogan’s sentiment that there really is no “doing it wrong” (who defines what’s right?)  Still though, if everyone out there could at least stop doing one or two of these things, I’d be very appreciative, kthxbai!

I’m going with a mostly text minimalist theme called Grady.  I’ve already done a pretty good amount of customization (most notably, killing the sidebar, resizing the content area, making this a single column theme).  I needed a test post, so this is a test post about testing my new design.

Index page
Title of the page. In place, SEO stuff is missing though?  Page title’s for individual posts seem to be broken, to be fixed (high importance).
Site name. Check, clickable.
Description/tag line. Replaced by twitter status, looks to be working just fine.
Header image. No header image, by design.
Favicon. Present and accounted for.
Excerpts, Thumbnails and Full Posts. The index is showing full posts, no excerpts here
Post Titles/Permalinks. Permalinks working, single post pages look fine.
Comment links. Comment counts are good.  Comment form works.
Categories/Tags.  Category links displayed and working.  No tag links, by design.
Meta description. Meta-tags in source are intact.
Index sidebar (s), navigation links and footer
Widget enabled theme. Sidebar (painstakingly) removed from this theme, by design.
Widget order. See above.
Links in widgets the sidebar. See above.
Site wide navigation Relocated to the header.  Navigation looks good and works well.
Archive pages - tags, categories, sitemap, and date based
Index page tests.  Category archives only, again by design.  Other posts are listed chronologically but there is no date-based archive (who wants to see what I posted in March 2008?)
Single Post pages
Title bar. Sitename is missing.  SEO plugin needs some checking.
Post Title. Post Title is present and clickable.
Comment links. No comment links near the title.  This is OK, I think.  There are comment links near the title on the blog front page and the comment form itself is below the post on single post pages, where you would expect to find it.  Comment counts are working.
Next/Previous post links. Displayed below the post, work well.
Page layout. Again, no sidebars, header navigation present, footer present.
Categories and tags. Category displayed and clickable, possibly a spacing issue though for the category name.
Breadcrumbs. None.
Comment and Trackbacks
Comment form. Present, functional.
Comments. Comments and comment counts work.  Gravatars missing!  Another “must fix”.
Trackbacks. Trackbacks work fine.
Test comment. Test comment submitted, fine.
Comment feed. Comment feed works, but perhaps I should make it more discoverable?
Subscribe by email. Email subscriptions broken?  Will investigate this one too.
Comment subscriptions. Subscribe to comments option
Regular pages
Comments on pages.  Disabled
Sidebars. None
Page hierarchy. Is the hierarchy displayed the way you want it to be? How about your permalink?
Repeat all the tests for the single post pages.
Images and image links
Images. Images load, alt text works.
Larger image. Images link to themselves, works.
RSS feed
New post. Rss feed functional, full posts.
RSS Link.  Double checked, working
Errors and Redirects
404 page.  404 page works well, usefulness++.
Redirects.  None.
Contact form (if applicable)
Send a test email. Contact form works, could use some restyling to match the rest of the theme.
Confirmation. Required field check works, confirmation appears appropriately.  Restyling is in order, again.

Upon test-posting, lots of problems discovered