Sunday, January 09, 2005
Randomly perusing the BlogosphereWell, tonight I have been randomly scanning the outpourings of my fellow bloggers, by means of the "Next Blog" button. I probably clicked that little button a couple of hundred times finding the great, the good, the scary, the weird and the incomprehensible. The main reason I guess was to get some ideas for what I can do to liven my own site up. I was also curious to see how long (on average) it would take for my own blog to appear. Actually, that was the primary reason, but since that sounds rather arrogant and egotistical I decided to try and claim I did it for sensible reasons.
I've garnered quite a few nice ideas that I will adapt/shamelessly plagiarise in the near future. However, since praising people is not my style, I have instead decided to bitch about things I don't like. Of course I have no intention of being crass enough to name names - particularly since I've been here less than a week and am using a free template...
1) Removing the NavBar so the nextblog button disappears. It seems rather bad manners that if someone else is able to find your blog randomly, not to extend the courtesy. It also means that I had to move the mouse pointer to navigate back to the preceding page. I am lazy, I don't like to do that.
2) Which brings me on to my second gripe. Twenty minute page transitions. OK a bit of an exageration, but I have a 2Mbit connection (nyah nyah nyah) and am used to instant gratification. Nothing is worse than having to sit through an excrutiatingly slow page transition before I can even hit the Next Blog button. This is doubly irritating if you have just had to return to the page because the next blog had no nav bar (see above).
3) Unreadable fonts. I'm not talking about other languages, after all I don't expect my browser to correctly parse simplified chinese or Hebrew (although I was a little surprisd to see it did understand Arabic, don't recall installing that - oh well, if I'm feeling generous I can lend my laptop to my muslim friend). Indeed the blogs I refer to often have page elements, such as the profile, written in english. Rather I'm talking about people who use obscure fonts that only 3 computers in the world can read (and 2 of those belong to the font's author). I even saw one where the blogger had reduced the fontsize of the default font to 6 point to fit more on a page. Ouch! Disability legislation obviously hasn't reached blogger yet!
4) Dialog boxes when you leave the site. This is so not funny when you only changed your virus scanning software this week and the Dialog box informs you that you have just downloaded a virus. Oh Ha Ha Ha! My sides were splitting! And 5 boxes in a row, each one with an increasingly inane message, is just bad manners.
Next Post will include blogs that I actually like!
# posted by SaneScientist @ 5:35 am
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