It took me a couple of days, but I wrote my first plugin for Wordpress last week to fix the default way Wordpress displays your blogroll.

The default Links Widget in Wordpress works by pulling your entire blogroll into an unconfigurable list. This is fine if your blogroll only contains five or ten very descriptive links, but it doesn’t scale well if your blogroll contains a ton of obscurely named blogs. The longer the list gets, the less your readers will be able to see the individual links in it. The more obscure the link titles are, the less they’ll trust them.

If your readers don’t see a it, or they don’t trust it, they’re not going to click it.

So how do you fix that?

While I enjoy and appreciate the effort that goes into the 100+ blogs that I chew through daily, there are a number of things that grind my gears. Here’s my top 10:

10. Put in huge blocks of text and never break them up

I don’t care what that big, fat, snotty ass of an English teacher told you about writing. Writing for the web is different than writing for the approval of a washed up author. Most of the time, people don’t read your site, they skim it. Newspapers traditionally break up their paragraphs into smaller chunks to provide multiple places for your eye to rest on your way down the page. The web is exactly the same. When you give me big blocks of text, I lose my place a lot and end up getting aggravated. When I get aggravated, I read something else.

You know when you’re really excited about what you think is a great idea and people just look at you with that “And where’s the punchline” look? That’s how I felt getting up today. I spent so much time on my Top 10 Driving Albums post that I expected that it would be more of a hit than it was. I really put about a weeks worth of time into picking that music, and even convinced poor Tankboy to get into the action, and it generated slightly more than no interest.

It was sort of a let down.

I admit that I still haven’t got a clue where traffic comes from on the net, and I honestly don’t know how some sites generate a high number of visitors and commentors. On a basic level, I shrug it off on the premise that you have to network to get readers, and I suck at networking. On a deeper level, though, I know that content is king. And when I think about my content being the problem, I start to feel bad. I’m much more comfortable with the idea of generating gems that no one sees, than I am with generating a bunch of shit that isn’t useful to anyone. The first idea means that I’m simply undiscovered. The second means I’m deservedly ignored.

When someone like Dooce can write about every poop her kid takes and get world famous, and I can spend years putting out post after post without being famous among dozens, I found myself having to consider the less appealing view as a possibility. The numbers don’t lie, and the truth is sometimes a little ugly.

To distract myself, I spent some time looking up average salaries for jobs that had similar descriptions to mine. I really tried to pick job descriptions that were very closely tied to mine while avoiding those that sounded like they were obviously steps above me. Not considering myself an average employee (who does, really?), I was surprised to find that I was pretty average in terms of salary. To prove to myself that I was at least on the high side of average, I took one of my checks and calculated my exact salary. I was hoping to be at least slightly above average, just to feel better about something.

After doing the math on my gross pay for the second time in a row, I confirmed that I was not only below average, but I was actually earning less than I thought I was. Once again the numbers were ruining my happy little illusions.

I started dwelling on my job and finally admitted to myself that after 13 years with the same company, it’s not that I don’t want to play the corporate game to get ahead. The real deal is that I have no fucking idea what game is even being played. While people are steadily moving their pieces around the board, I’ve been setting up a perfect, four move checkmate on the pop-o-matic using only my queen, my bishop, and Cobra commander.

So, there I was, without a clue as to how to excel at my job or my hobbies, faced with the mounting evidence that I’m average, if not below average, on the things that eat most of my waking hours. Everyone wants to feel like they are above average, but if you look at the evidence facing you, and it says otherwise, do you ignore it and cling to your illusions, or face the facts and accept the reality of your situation?

My questions are these:

How do you find blogs that you to read?

How do find people who like to read you?

and

What do you find works best for cleaning your bathroom?

People think that there is something wrong with me when I don’t blog. Sometimes, there is, and sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes I am actually out enjoying the benefits of a 3D world, leaving the Virtual Jon behind. I feel guilty about it, you can believe that, but there’s much more to life than documenting the mundane crap that happens to me. And there’s much more for you than reading it, so I gave us all a break.