I'm trying to keep my business, my triplets, and my waistline under control. I excel at one of those, fail at another one of those, and one is a work in progress. Which is which is day dependant.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

A Blogger's Gripe

Stuff I hate about other people's blogs, in no particular order:

- Endless blog rolls or link lists which never get updated or are so long as to be annoying. My own blog list (over there on the right) verges on being too long, but at least it gets updated once in a while.

- Too much visual crap cluttering up the page so you have to hunt for the actual post content. Counters, etc are fun but you do not need to count down to your next bathroom stop as well as days to Xmas and also have fifteen flashing widgets.

- Music. Your blog is not so fabulous that it needs a musical introduction every time I open the page.

- Award lists: I like getting blog awards, I just don't feel I need to clutter my page up with them. Acknowledge them in a post, pass them on, and that's it. In 5 minutes from now we won't care if you got the "E is for Excellent" award.

- Blogs who do not let you read the entire post in a reader. Why is this so?

- Blogs that used to be about parenthood and funny stuff but are now all about the cool people they met at BlogHer and all the secret cool people's business that went on there

- Blogs that used to be great to read until the author got a book deal. Jealous much? Yes. But also annoyed much ... because it used to be all fun and games until someone got a book deal, and then it got all boring and forced and not interesting to read at all.

- I'm more of a lurker than a commenter, but if someone takes the time to visit me and comment, you can bet I'll be doing the same in return (where possible, some of you choose to be Anon E. Mouse.)

- Food blogs which have now become food porn blogs to an extreme degree, as it's now suddenly all become about the EIGHTEEN close up photos of chocolate chip cookies. Why do you need to many pics when one or two will do?

... and that's all I can think of for now. Who wants to join in on my complaints about blogs free for all?

3 comments:

Rachel said...

As well as all of the above, I also dislike blogs that have very busy, patterned backgrounds or that use a weird colour for the text (one I sometimes read is pink text on white background - really strains the eyes!) If I can see all the post in my reader then it's ok but if I have to click through to the blog it can be a real distraction!
R x

Jenny said...

And re:
- Blogs who do not let you read the entire post in a reader. Why is this so?

I heard that there are some apps that will steal content automagically via feed. Not that they can't do it manually anyway by visiting your blog, but that it's made even simpler by feed. I guess some people just don't want to make it easier to steal stuff. Me, I can't get my dev to modify my RSS setup to show more. He insists that the stubs are better programmatically (even if practically that's not the case).

I hate the clutter too, but don't mind if the awards and mentions are off something like the About page - something I'm not forced to look at each time.

But most irritating to me are inline ads. Right gob-smack in the middle of the post. I hate those. I think they look like garbage and make you look cheap.

While I'm on my soapbox, I also don't like when people solicit feedback on their blog, you take the time to give them some, and they either never ack it or they never reciprocate. I can think of a couple big name blogs that weren't big names once, and it feels like take, take, take with them. I don't comment on their sites anymore.

:) Guess I should just chill out and drink a cup of tea now.

emzeegee & the hungry three said...

Thanks for your comments Jenny and Rachel... and I had no idea people could "steal content"! This makes me feel like a total pleb but then maybe I have no content worth stealing in the first place.

Ahh, the wonderful world of blogging...

M