A Blog Reader's Plea

I recently read Carmel Galvin's excellent post Untangle those Blogger Knots.  This set me thinking about a pet peeve of mine and a piece of advice  I wish geneabloggers would heed from me.

I travel a lot and try to keep up with blog reading on my smartphone when I have a spare moment. I find it most irritating when I am unable to read a blog post because it is not optimised for mobile devices.

GeniAus - At sea on a smartphone

When some blogs display on a mobile device the font is so small that is is nearly impossible to read. On others the font is in a pale colour that is also hard to read, I am a fan of pale gray but not as a font on a white background. (I am thinking of one blog in particular that uses a Wordpress theme but there are several I follow that are difficult to read).

In this 21st century many folk like me use their smartphones for a lot of their internet browsing. You may be missing out on potential readers if your blog is hard to read on these devices.

Have you taken a look at how your blog displays on a smartphone? Is the font tiny? Does the reader have to do a lot of scrolling from left to right to read each line? Is there plenty of contrast between the font and background colours to make reading easy?

I realise that some bloggers do not have smartphones and are therefore unable to see how their blogs look on these devices. Perhaps you could ask a friend to view your blog on their smartphone. If you don't have a smartphone toting friend feel free to send me your blogs' URLs and I'll take a look for you.

Hiding my Age

A prompt from Geneabloggers over the weekend reminded me that I had missed my blogiversary last week. I must be hiding my age well because, although Geneabloggers told me that this blog had started in 2009 I thought I was a tad older than that. I've put a reminder in my Google Calendar so that I won't miss this event next year when GeniAus turns 8.

Going back through the archives I discovered my first GeniAus post from 5 November 2008.

GeniAus First Post

 Who was I kidding? Crowded? Back in 2008 there were very few geneablogs around, I am so thrilled that, when I retired, I found a niche in which to blog. I had been blogging about education, libraries and technology for several years and enjoyed communicating via this medium and wanted to continue writing bits and pieces. I am pleased that many of my Australian Genimates have taken up blogging, presently I follow over 200 Australasian Blogs in my RSS reader.

Unfortunately I didn't keep a screen shot of my blog as it appeared in 2008. The first image in 2011 I have comes from The Wayback Machine.

GeniAus Blog 27 January 2011

Although the blog has had a number of new looks over the years the thing that has remained constant is my GeniAus portrait done by my then 7 year old granddaughter.

GeniAus Portrait 2008

Entering the Geneasphere via this blog opened up a whole new world to me. I am so grateful to all the friends and opportunities it brought my way. Thank you to all who have stopped by GeniAus over the years, I appreciate your friendship, interest and support.

My life has been enriched by through Geneablogging.