Be an Sleuthing Angel In Disguise II and Save Your Friends Boatloads of Angst
Jul 3rd, 2008 | By Barbara | Category: 2010 Economy, Coaching, Make Things Simple
Morning!
And how are you today? I wll confess to being less healthy than an ice cream cone guarded by 23 sugar-deprived children; I’ve been flinging my mind to the far corners of the universe in search of techniques to over-deliver to my customers.
Good news – ideas flew fast and furious! Bad news – "what’s this thing called ‘moderation’? "
Ah well, these things happen! True, they DO seem to happen in my family with unnerving frequency, but what’s life without a little bit of soul-searing toenail-chewing hair-whitening throat-drying coffee-depriving sanity-destroying finger-squooshing happy bouncy challenges?
Ah…. I digress.
A few weeks ago, I wrote Be an covert angel and set the groundwork for unwitting success and Be a hero and proactively avert online disaster for your real life friends – ’they were quick little posts that described how you can proactively monitor your friends and family via Google news alerts, and how to add specialized rooms for when they buy clues and are ready to take on the Internet.
Today, I’d like to delve into a nifty good deed that you can do for your fellow colleagues and friends who have a presence on the Internet. And that is, of course, being a sleuthing angel in disguise.
How so, I hear you ask?
Simple! By offering a fresh pair of eyes, of course.
Have you ever redesigned your blog or your website or your MySpace profile or your….you get the idea?
Have you ever noticed that even after you’ve gone over it for 21 years with 482 fine-toothed combs and a plethora of hairbands, you STILL end up missing mistakes more blatantly obvious than a prancing pink pony at a drought-filled Serengeti watering hole?
It’s utterly maddening, isn’t it? Because you’ve been staring sooo long at the blasted updates, your eyes tend to glaze over like a Krispy Kreme Original Glazed Donut and you just plain overlook the fact that:
You’ve spelled "You’re" as "Your"
While your image looks peachy on your home workstation, it’s broken online because you refer to the local copy that exists ONLY on your computer
You neglect to re-active Recaptcha so your comment box is deactivated (took me a day to realize that for my own site)
You forget to re-include your Woopra or Analytics tracking code
You forget to squoosh your graphics via MyImager so their sizes are larger than 8 hot air balloons on steroids
Ah yes, I see you nodding your head there! It’s really heck, isn’t it?
Well now…let’s think in terms of your friends. Chances are, they know less about site design than you, right? Wouldn’t it be great if you could catch their mistakes for them and alert them hours after their site goes live?
It’s easy to do! I do this for about 50-60 different clients/friends/sites/ etc – I receive notifications whenever a site is updated, and can quickly give a once-over spot-check to catch errors that might have been missed. Such a lookover can be critical in uncovering mistakes that can otherwise damage a stellar site.
The service I use is WatchThatPage. A free online goodie, it lets you enter in the website or target URLs of pages of which you want to keep track….and whenever a change is detected, you’re immediately alerted.
The benefits to this are huge! If you’re a professional developer, you can keep track of your client’s updates for continued customer care service.
…and if you’re simply a good friend to your colleagues, you can watch from the sidelines and give them a boost whenever it’s needed.
Yes, it’s an effort to take the 2 minutes required to visually peruse changes…but if the person is someone about whom you care, the benefits derived far outweight the energy involved! Remember, we’re all fellow travelers in this thing called ‘reality’ – looking out for one another is simply a great way to live your own life.
How do you look out for your friends and family online? I’d love to hear your ideas!
Enjoy,
Barbara
#BEGIN highlights of this blog writing post:
Beginners blogging tips: Look out for your friends.
Intermediate and/or Advanced blogging tips: And they’ll look out for you.
#END highlights of this blog writing post
Like this post? Please feel free to tell your friends and Digg It – I very much appreciate your time!
ps – speaking about angels:
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That sounds like a very nice thing to do. Your friends are lucky! What got you starting it?
Hi!
Folks awhile back in corporate land would look out for me…and I never forgot it.
Enjoy, Barbara
Barbara – your descriptions crack me up. My husband often checks what I’ve written for typo’s – I make some terrible ones. The worst has to be confusing soul and sole. I once described a business person who wasn’t incorporated as a soul trader.
Cath Lawson’s last blog post..Question and Answer Time
Hey Cath!
What really scrapes my eyeballs is seeing ‘your‘ used when “you’re” is the word that screams out for acceptance. ARGH! Oh, and “like” as in, “Like you know, at school like I was over at my locker like when you know a band of maniacal lunch room teachers wearing frosted petunias came like over to me and like shrieked “You didn’t like bring back your like lunch like tray! Off to the like detention room!”
Like you dig?
Barbara
Hi Barbara,
Yes… It’s sometimes the most obvious that gets missed. After a while it becomes just a sea of words.
I have an eye for detail… (must be all those years of creating my own greeting cards & craft) and mistakes seem to jump out & slap me in the face… sometimes much to the annoyance of others.
If I come across a mistake on a site, whether I know them or not, I will usually try to contact them.
Reminds me of the other night, though not online, I was following someone with an obvious flat tyre. I tried a polite tooting & pointing but she chose to ignore me. Hopefully it got pumped up before it hit the rim.
Gaida’s last blog post..Training For the World Rowing U23 Championships
Hi Gaida,
Doing good deeds and letting folks know when there are issues is a good thing indeed! I try to walk that walk myself whenever I come across blatant mistakes too.
Best wishes,
Barbara
Hi Gaida,
Good for you! I try as well to let folks know when I’ve come across mistakes – it’s simply a nice thing to do.
I know what you mean regarding an eye for detail – while most people see the look/feel of a new site the first time they visit, I go over my mental check list to see, okay, was this networking aspect included? Was that title tag modified? etc.etc.etc. Drives me bonkers sometimes.
Barbara