BlogBoy doesn’t often make political stands when it comes to the online world, but this is one that can’t be ignored. There isn’t a blogger alive who doesn’t need to consider freedom of speech issues in fact. In Yahoo news this morning they write about public online spaces not having the same freedom of speech rights as say your public park.

‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry speech, rights
“Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content
that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their
own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they
cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.”

That might sound ominous and horrible, just like everything that the Bush administration has done for the last seven years, and in a way it is all of that. On the other hand that is the nature of doing business. Suffice it to say blogging is a business or at least you should be thinking of it as such if you ever plan to make money.

These companies be they MySpace, Yahoo, Google or even your own hosting company all have an image to maintain. If you associate yourselves with them and threaten that image they have every right and not to mention a responsibility to their stock holders to maintain that image even if it means pissing off a paying subscriber. That is called risk management, the world revolves around it. Yes, sometimes it seems unfair, but life isn’t fair. If you think life should be fair take your candy ass somewhere else because I can almost bet I won’t like you or really care what you have to say.

Do you see how that works or get the subtle of what I have just told you? This space is mine and there is very little you can do to stop me from saying what I want. if this was MySpace, Facebook, or LiveJournal I could could still get away with telling you to ‘go fuck yourself’, however there are plenty of places I couldn’t and keep my account very long. Just as i could get away with saying what I would like to do to Cat Deeley or Kourtni Lind on those same places, I couldn’t tell you the same thing about the teenage girl who lives across the street. Not that she interests me in the least, I could tell you what I would like to do to her on my my own blog if I had such an interest. While I don’t have an unlimited ability to say those things because of the agreement I have with my hosting company, it certainly lets me go a lot farther than any community blog will.

Now if I wanted to write twisted perverse stories about the girl, i am pretty sure I couldn’t get away with that very long with Host Gator, especially if I used any sort of details. More precisely, I could until someone told on me and my account just disappeared. I am not willing to run that risk, even if I do get daily backups of all my databases and have every post stored locally for all of my blogs. I like the price I pay for hosting and get good service, so my risk management assessment says no to cute blond mid teenage girl meets thirty something blogboy who turns out to be the sperm donor that gave her life porn stories. There are hosting companies that would let me host that and wouldn’t even bat an eye because it is tame compared to some of what people post. Those companies have made risk assessments too, and charge you accordingly.

When it comes right down to it if you are a blogger and want to say what ever the hell you want, there are some rules you need to pay attention to. First unless your speech and ideas are very tame, you risk losing an account almost anywhere you go. If you want to say what is on your mind pretty much unfettered then you need to get yourself a domain account with a good hosting company, click the Host Gator ad to your right for a really good deal. Lastly if you are going to publish what amounts to porn, get a hosting company that specializes in and allows it.

Before you say you shouldn’t have to put up with a company interfering with your right to say what ever you want while using there service it is time to ask yourself if you want to be called a hypocrite. If you blog and use any sort of spam filter or moderate comments you are censoring another person’s speech. Know the game, know the rules and know that you will always be playing by someone else’s rules…

The First thing you need to do when thinking about a theme is deciding who you are designing it for. There are a number of tools that will tell you what your visitor’s monitors resolution is set to and this is a key factor to consider. As often as not these days new computers come with a wide screen monitor and most of the older 17 and 19″ 4:3 monitors were capable of 1280×1024. Like I said use one of the many site tools to figure out what size people are viewing your blog at.

For me 1% were using 640×480, that is just too small to design an effective money making blog. 9% were doing 800×600, which can be done, but 90% of my viewers were using something more, so I chose to go bigger. Only 25% had resolutions above 1440, meaning If I went higher than that 75% of my people would lose something and I Almost certainly would love that low res 10% crowd.

I settled for going with a width of 1000 pixels for the theme. Some of the other considerations that went into this size were the fact I knew as I grow I will attarct more and more people using legacy resolutions and didn’t want to alienate them. 1000 pixels fit on most everyone desktop and didn’t waving me looking around for information all over the screen. In consideration for the low res crowd I made my text window which has all the posts and pages visible on their full screen.

If you take a look at http://www.bradstinyworld.com you can see how it looks since it is the newest theme I have done, even if it is based on an older design. I build a single continuous banner in Photoshop and began to slice it up after I knew how I wanted the final lay out to work. I used the method described on Photoshop Candy to design the graphics after having looked through several interesting Photoshop sites.

There are those who dislike the notion of a big graphical banner when you enter a site, but for me I think it gives a great vision of who you are and the mood you are trying to set. There are some SEO considerations though since at most all a spider has to read in an image is the alt tags and the links if you used separate images. I solved this problem by using some CSS tricks which we can get into later. On Brad’s Tiny World you get a full package of text in that header, but the average viewer is never going to see it. I matched the color and made it transparent which is enough for most browsers, but for good measure I made it only 1 pixel high. Google will read it all the same, but as a designer I get the satisfaction of putting together pretty graphics unmarred by ugly text.

In the next part of this we will discuss whether you should widgetize or not.