Today I'll see how many bloggers I can interest/irritate by discussing a quick list of what I think works and doesn't work in a blog:

• I truly despise blogs that publish only the first few sentences in their feed. I use an offline reader just because I know I can do some reading without having a connection, so the intro thing breaks that. Beyond that, it's just annoying to have to click a second time to see what I should already be reading. Quit worrying about your page views, publish the material! Though to be fair, I still read the blogs if they have good content.

• I like blogs that are consistent in posting. Once a week, once a month, whatever the timetable, I feel like those people take their blogs seriously. Perhaps a high standard to set, or even an unfair one since there are some great inconsistent blogs.

• Equally, I'm not fond of blogs that only get a post when the owner learns something. I know some people use their blog as a repository for those odd scraps of hard won information and that's fine, but at that point is it really a blog?

• Echoing announcements. I don't need 700 SQL bloggers to tell me service pack X has been released. What I would enjoy is if you found something interesting in the readme or the install, or talk about how/when/why your organization handles service packs

• It's entirely fair for the blogger to define whatever mission statement they want (here I blog about SQL, business, community, but never politics), just try to stick to that mission. Then I can read a few posts when I discover your blog and get a sense of proportion, do I want to read the other stuff (and maybe even find it valuable?), or will I just pick it up in one of the super feeds like Database Weekly? Blogs that let me grab a filtered feed help ease the pain in some cases.

• I like posts that are a few hundred words or a few paragraphs. Long enough to engage me, not so long that I'm reading a white paper. Try to talk about one thing per post. Got two things to say? Two posts.

• Posts that look forced. I see more than a few blogs where you see a post come up and it has that feeling of "the boss just yelled at me for not maintaining my blog". Maybe I'm wrong on that. Nothing good about being made to do something you don't want to do. Of course, sometimes even those posts have value.

• Show me you can think and show me what you are really interested in, don't play for page views. Few of us are going to make money blogging, so why not write about things that come easy and show passion?

Do I stick to my own rules? Got your set of pet peeves (hopefully bloggers blogging about blogs is not one of them)?