7 Deadly Blog Sins
I’m sure everyone’s just dying for a snot update. In order not to keep you in suspense any longer, I’m pleased to report that the fiercely raging rivers of snot spurting from my nose have since slowed to a gentle trickle or two and will probably dry up completely in a couple of days, provided I don’t go near another snot-filled entity. The grumpy mood, however, continues to persist in overstaying its welcome.
Perhaps it’s the grumpiness speaking, but blog surfing hasn’t exactly been a pleasant experience lately. It has occasionally caused my eyes and ears to bleed. Yes, you read that right. Reading blogs has not only caused my eyes but also the things attached to the sides of my head to bleed.
So what has been causing my orifices to gush out blood? Well, I’ve been coming across more and more blogs that have committed what I call the…
*Dramatic pause*
…”7 Deadly Blog Sins“. And they are:
1) “Skip this ad”.
So I see a link to a blog that might be interesting and I click on it, and hey the hey, in my face is an ad that takes up a full page. That’s all you see before you even see the blog and you have to click “skip this ad” to view the effing blog. You bet your ass I’m “skipping this ad” and while I’m at it, I’m “skipping this blog” as well. Next.
2) Autoplay embedded video.
Assuming you have no annoying “skip this ad” advertisements, I’d have arrived at your blog by now. Now, regular readers of this blog will already be familiar with my aversion to sites with embedded audio (HATE HATE HATE). There’s a reason why I don’t click on any link that has “myspace” in it. Recently, I’ve come across a new breed of terror and that is embedded video with autoplay. What’s worse, the ones I’ve seen don’t even have “stop” or “pause” buttons. I tell you, I couldn’t close my browser fast enough. I believe there’s a special place in hell for such offenders. Oh my bleeding ears.
3) Obnoxious blog colours.
And now we’ve come to the part that makes my peepers bleed. Besides the obvious fire-engine red, radioactive green and neon pink colour combinations that make my brain go all hurty just thinking about it, there’s another group that believes in the other extreme: subtlety. So effing subtle are their colours that I’ve to highlight the effing text just to be able to read it. I don’t know what kind of x-ray monitors these bloggers have, but if I can’t see a damn thing they’re writing without highlighting the text, I’m out of here.
3a) Loud wallpaper.
There’re also some blogs I’ve seen that use some really loud wallpapers which is fine if there’s a plain background between the wallpaper and the text. However, for some sites, the plain background either doesn’t load properly or fast enough so I’m once again left with bleeding eyes. For the love of all our peepers, either get rid of the ugly wallpaper or make damn sure the plain buffer is working. There’s no shame in having a plain white background, you know.
4) Bad navigation.
Rumour has it there’s this blog that’s pretty funny so I eagerly went to the blog to verify for myself. Big effing waste of time. I don’t know which planet this blogger lives on but the site navigation makes no sense to me at all. Obviously he’s not using earth logic when building his site. Further sniffing around has confirmed my suspicion that I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Too bad, for all I know, he could be the funniest blogger in the universe but if I’ve to use GPS to navigate his damn site, I’m not sticking around.
4a) No back button.
I’m sticking this under bad navigation. When I’m browsing blogs, if I find it interesting enough, I like to read older entries by clicking “older entries” or “back” buttons. I can’t find these on some blogs. This is very, very, very annoying to me. Please bring the buttons back.
5) Bad Text.
I’m not talking about the standard of English or anything like that. Goodness knows my blog’s riddled with all sorts of mistakes. I’m talking about blogs with no paragraphing or those that believe the only punctuation in the English language is the ellipsis. Blogs that don’t believe in paragraphs are hard to read. I don’t care if you paragraph randomly or whatever, just, you know, separate the blocks of text with some line spacing so my eyes don’t roll to the back of my head from seeing endless chunks of text. As for ellipses, blogs that only use them exclusively make me feel breathless. Commas and full stops don’t bite. You should try them occasionally. Just watch out for that exclamation mark. He’s a sneaky bastard.
6) Right click disabled.
I like to open new links by right clicking and I cannot even begin to tell you how much blogs that disable right-clicking annoy me. If you do it to deter people from copying your pictures or whatever, here’s a newsflash for you, there’re other ways to do it. All you end up doing is annoy legitimate readers like me. In short, DON’T FUCKING DISABLE RIGHT CLICKS. Geezus.
7) No Full Feed.
So if you haven’t committed any of the annoying sins above, then good for you! After perusing the content, I may just find your blog worth subscribing to so I decide to add your RSS feed to my reader. Now, I always preview the feeds in my reader before subscribing and what do I see? No full feed! I can tell you that the number of blogs I subscribe to without full feeds are very few. I can probably count them on one hand. You have to be a damn effing special kind of unique snowflake for me to even consider subscribing if you don’t publish full feeds. Life’s too short to waste on those who don’t so I just move on.
Of course, these are just what I consider to be deadly blog sins. YMMV. So what are your blog no-nos?
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Without Autoplay embedded video the world wouldn’t have Rick Rolling and that would make me a sad panda :(
Jason - GorillaSushi’s last blog post..Yes, But You Can’t Deny It Rocks
As I recall, you seem to do that well enough without autoplay videos anyway. (*@&#*@#(@
All these points certainly make my list. I am annoyed enough that I have disabled JavaScript in my browser. As master of my own browsing experience, I shut the silly shenanigans right down before they start. MWAhaha.
As for the poor readability types (osmosis?) there are ways around that too, but life is too short. We can hope that these excessively creative types will eventually grow some smarts and clean up their act, but a new crop of offenders always seem to be there thinking they have created something new and improved.
Good list.
The idea of disabling JS is certainly becoming more and more attractive to me.
very nice list. i agree with this soo much.
annoying ads is the easiest way to scare me away from your site. ask myspace why i only go there 1% of what i used to… ‘congratulations… you have been selected to receive TWO FREE iPOD NANO”… i really really hate that ad.
omar’s last blog post..On average, people’s IQs drop about 50 points on social websites.
I’ve no idea which ad you’re talking about actually. Just shows you how often I go to MySpace!
Lis….Well Done. I think you nailed every single miserable blog that can and does cause external and internal bleeding.
Glad you ALMOST feel better. xxoo
meleah rebeccah’s last blog post..Day People Vs Night People
I’m glad I almost feel better too. Hee!
Wow do I hope I haven’t committed any of these (I’m not smart enough to know for sure), cuz I’d sure hate to lose you as a reader.
I think a blog sin is when someone throws out some link love and forgets to link me. But that’s just the PR side of me being selfish. Really. No really, I mean it.
;-)
Michael C’s last blog post..Before You Call In Sick Today, Read This
Note to self: Remember to mention Michael’s blog now and then to prevent being mentioned in an unfavourable light in any future musicals he may pen.
Good list, while I am not in compliance with all of the items……most of them bother me. I don’t think I have seen any pop up ads on blogs yet as most of my blog surfing limited to entrecard member’s sites.
charles’s last blog post..The Green Movement Needs To Move Faster Than ?Green Day?
Unfortunately, the few blogs that I’ve come across with the obnoxious pop-up ads were Entrecard blogs.
Amen, hallelujah, and high-five! Yeah, you might have guessed that I kinda agree with you. :o)
Other hate-hate-hate blog elements for me include:
- Having lots of links within the body of the article that are not real links, but just ads. I won’t click through on ANYTHING on those blogs, and I’ll usually unsubscribe.
- The addition of cool new sidebar features or masthead/design elements on a blog without mentioning it in the RSS feed. C’mon, bloggers — some of us read a LOT of blogs via RSS feed and only rarely go to your actual site. But we will when invited.
- Blogs that post racy or highly personal photos without warning in the headline that they’re going to be NSFW. Recent example: For new blogs that interest me, I put them in a “Blogs I’m Test-Driving” folder on Bloglines until I’m sure I want to subscribe long-term. One personal blog in that category recently got deleted when I opened it to see an unannounced up-close photo of the blogger’s testicles. Gosh, NO THANKS, Avitable. And to make it worse, the aforementioned hangers-on were not even the post’s topic. They were just gratuitous balls.
Just curious — was the funny site with bad navigation Ze Frank’s? That site’s “organization” always drove me crazy despite the wonderful contents.
Carolyn Bahm’s last blog post..How to Make a Hospital Stay More Bearable
Okay, testicles? Good freakin’ lawd.
I’ve seen the ones with the ad links that have some sort of pop-ups when you hover over them. Talk about annoying. I’ve recently come across some Xanga blogs that had a SUBSCRIBE TO THIS BLOG pop-up the minute I landed on the blog. I had to close the damn thing before I could view the blog. I sure as hell wasn’t going to subscribe before I even had a chance to read it.
Nope, not Ze Frank. I had to google to see who you were referring to. My goodness, there’re waaaaay too many links on the top page.
Popups, popunders, pop behinds, and those “are you sure you want to navigate away from this page” windows-type boxes.
The only ones worse are the sites that steal your browser away and freeze it. There is a special place in hell for those bloggers and webmasters.
CyberCelt’s last blog post..Earth Hour 2008
Oh yeah, they can share a bunk in hell with the ones who embed audio/video without pause buttons on their sites.
I especially like blogs where people get pissed off about things and throw a few F-bombs around. I also like stick figures that bleed from stick orifices.
.45’s last blog post..Ask .45, Again
Doesn’t everyone?
You forgot captcha images.
While there is nothing wrong with trying to avoid SPAM - images that do not display cause those that like to comment to leave. Forever.
Frank Kanu’s last blog post..Let Everything Go Uncontrolled
Although captcha images aren’t that high up on my annoyance scale yet, it does get irritating when I can’t even make out what the letters/numbers are. I much prefer the simple Maths questions.
Glad you are having less snot. Hope you actually feel better too.
I’d add two more blogging sins to your list. Comment verification and not being able to find where to click to make a comment. I seem to have to type word verification at least twice each time I get stuck with it. I don’t know why people can’t just moderate their comments, it works for me.
For your blog the comment button was hard to find. As you can see I did find it. But I was getting a bit peeved trying to search for it.
Laura’s last blog post..What’s Your Nerdiness?
Oh hey thanks for the feedback on the comment button. I didn’t realise it wasn’t easy to find. I thought it would be obvious to readers that the digit in the box leads to the comments. I’ll have to see about adding something more obvious. Ha! That’ll teach me to assume!
Haha! I agree with you on all the points, especially the embedded videos. What makes people think, ‘I will just put this video here and make it play automatically!’? It really just boggles my mind.
Gary R. Hess’s last blog post..How to Write Great Content and Keep Visitors Interested
Yeah! As annoying as it is, what makes it worse are the sites that don’t give readers the options to turn the damn thing off.
Embedded autoplay audio KILLS me!!
Deb (Missives From Suburbia)’s last blog post..You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto
You and me both!
Nice list. I wouldn’t dream of doing any of the others but I do break the last one about the full feed. At the time I set it up I used to use more photos and assumed that RSS readers would prefer to keep their browsing more nimble. You know a quick Am I interested? yes or no sort of thing.
I don’t mind clicking through - is it really a deadly sin?
SB
Scott’s last blog post..Build Your Own Best Of - Chicago
Well, some people actually do prefer excerpts in their feeds but I prefer to decide for myself using feed reader options. When I first started reading blogs in the reader, I noticed that I would let half-feed blogs pile up and not click through whereas I was reading and commenting more on full feed blogs. The rare times I actually click through were when the excerpts were tantalising enough for me to do so. Eventually, I just removed them from my reader.
I know bloggers publish half feeds for many reasons but if it’s to encourage click-throughs and comments, that doesn’t work on me.
Now,I’m wondering if I’m commiting any of these sins.
Better go check right away.
Alexandra’s last blog post..WTF???!!!
Ha! Your blog is fine! :)
I’m Glad it is. I went and changed my settings as not to offend anybody.
Alexandra’s last blog post..Money,Money.Money
“2) Autoplay embedded video.
…”
In the same family would be seizure-inducing flashing graphics.
“5) Bad Text.
…the only punctuation in the English language is the ellipsis.”
I don’t think you placed sufficient emphasis on exclamation points!!!!!! They’re really annoying!!!!! I’ve seen blog posts where every sentence ends with a string of them!!!!!
“6) Right click disabled.
…”
I didn’t even know you could do this. Shows how much I know. I need to get out more.
feefifoto’s last blog post..Thursday Thirteen: I Watched Way Too Much Television As A Kid
Oh god yes, I’ve forgotten about the flashing graphics. Good thing I don’t see them around often anymore.
Damn. I have (And am) doing some of these… I also hate the Audio adverts… Or just music playing! I wish i could stop it some some sort of plugin.
Thanks for the list :D
Lee’s last blog post..New Design, New Look, Same Blog
My simple solution to auto-play audio is to keep my sound turned off. I don’t need the whole office to know that I’m surfing the web. Lately, I’ve started keeping a headset plugged into the computer and stuffed in my drawer, so that if I want to hear audio, I just put my headset on.
Haley’s last blog post..Life: Vertigo!
I turn off the volume too but I listen to music on my PC fairly often and it’s freakin’ annoying to have some site’s bad taste in music blaring together with my music at the same time.
I think your blog’s still redeemable. Heh.
Great list, Lis. I’m with ya wholeheartedly on #1 and #2 most definitely. Whatever happened to “content is king”? I’ll add 2 more:
1) Just blogs in general that do nothing more then tell you how to blog. I’m not talking about neat tips and tricks for using plugins, or templates, etc. I’m talking about all those zillion affiliate marketing, here’s-how-you-can-make-$50000-a-month-blogging type of blogs. They dont’ actually BLOG about anything. They just slap hundreds of links down and tell you to link to them. It’s a pyramid scheme without the pyramid. Gahr. Andrew smash!
2) And how about blogs that don’t use stick figures? Huh?! Why that’s, well all but one I know of. More stickies please!
Andrew’s last blog post..I Have Officially Grossed Myself Out
Yeah! Us stickies are in danger of becoming extinct. More of us please!
Lis - good list. I’m right with you on all of these. I hate autoplay audio and video and also overdoing the ads, especially at the top of the page, so you have to navigate a screen before getting to anything to read.
Ian’s last blog post..Lesbian vampire killers
Or the ones with head banners that take up the entire screen. I’ve forgotten about those.
Oh man. I fail on all counts :(
Gary’s last blog post..Daily Photo - Las Vegas, Nevada
Eh? I don’t remember seeing big ass ads or hearing autoplay audio last time I visited your site.
geez…am i an idiot blogger if i confess i have no idea what a full feed is? shows how much i “blop”. i concur with you on the “back” button though.
can i add my personal pet peeve of people who write advertising posts? (”i use this! it’s great! they pay me to tell you this!”) nothing irks me more than seeing one of the bloggers i read start product placement posts.
mmm…alliteration, my favorite literary device.
lillyelf’s last blog post..random things i get peeved about 3
I suck at explaining technical stuff so I’m just going to point you to this excellent post about RSS. Basically you can subscribe to feeds so that you get a heads up when your favourite blogs are updated with new posts. A full feed is when a blogger publishes the full content of their posts to RSS so you can read the entire post in your reader without the need to visit the blog. Some bloggers publish excerpts to their feeds so you need to go to their blogs to read the full posts.
As for paid posts, I don’t mind them if:
1) they are infrequent
2) bloggers are good enough in their writing skills to incorporate them in their usual posts so you barely even notice they’re paid posts
Having said that, I get really annoyed when knitting blogs do paid posts. 99% of the opportunities for paid posts out there have nothing to do with knitting so it’s quite jarring to see a page full of knitting content with a few posts about prescription glasses or wooden cabinets.
Goodness, I’ve written a freakin’ novel.
I’m guilty, I’m guilty! I use ellipsis all the time, it’s like an addiction. I had no idea it hurt eyes to do. At least I break my blocks of text into easily viewable paragraphs… (oops, there it goes again!) right?
Judi’s last blog post..Saturday Entrecard Link Love
Ha! Seriously, I barely notice the ellipses in your blog! As long as there is actually evidence of other punctuation in the posts, I’m happy. The blogs I was referring to use nothing but ellipses in their posts! When I was reading, it felt like the post was never going to end. Heh.
“This is the post that never ends
Yes it goes on and on my friend”
Lamb Chops.. showing your age Lis! ;)
Judi’s last blog post..Saturday Entrecard Link Love
Shhhhh! ;)
I did a similar post actually…
http://michaelpark.net/2008/01/16/what-not-to-do-for-your-blog/
Michael’s last blog post..A Flying Cockroach
Ooh I’ll check it out.
Now that is why I keep my blog as plain and simple so that it loads fast. I know how annoying it can be to wait for blogs with loads of stuff on it just to load up and by then, I’m already out of there!
Nick Phillips’s last blog post..The Wind Of Change …
Yeah, I can vouch for your blog. It does load fast! :)
Your list and my list are almost identical. I also add the hard to find comment button to it and any kind of “subscribe to my feed or anything” requirements. I WILL NOT subscribe for sure if greeted by one of those. I will NOT subscribe to anyone’s email feed — geez have you ever tried to get one of those to STOP??
I may be a tad more tolerant of wild colors than it sounds like you are, though as I kind of like bright colors and high contrast. It can be white text on black or black text on white or red text on either, but PULEEZE lose the light blue! My old eyes just can’t take that anymore!
Good post, Lis! Glad you are back among the living! It’s been way too quiet on the forum.
Margaret’s last blog post..Dead Days of Summer ? a Review
I’ve once been assaulted by a “subscribe to me now!!!eleventyone!!” popup on a xanga blog before I even had a chance to read the damn blog. Not pretty.
The type of high contrast you’re referring to sounds fine although I’m really not a fan of black backgrounds. I once came across this blog that was bright red with bright blue text. Man, I felt like my eyes were getting fried!
Agreed. Getting my feet wet with entrecard and other blogpromoting sites, I have to admit that I haven’t seen so many horrible sites in such a short period of time. Ever.
If these 7 “sins” were eliminated - we all would have it so much easier.
Putting so many widgets, labels and stickers on your site, that the content drown would make my #8.
Cheers, Klaus
Klaus’s last blog post..Picture of the Day - March 13th 2008
To be fair, there are some great blogs which I would never have come across without Entrecard. I do agree about the excessive widgets and all the other blog paraphernalia that make the blog load really, really slowly.
What really frosts my petunias is chatspeak. I ban it at my house and I ban it when my kids are online. It’s truly amazing how many fascinating ways people can find to mangle the English language.
Enjoy,
Barbara
Barbara Ling (aka Owlbert)’s last blog post..Viva the Easter Broccoli Bunny! Managing your blog fan’s expectations - Day 1 of 5
Oh yes! My friends who are teachers have been feeding me horrifying stories about their students using chatspeak/textspeak in their essays.
Yay! I just added back link to my typepad blog and if you want to know how to do it - check out my blog. LOL. I hope it doesn’t make yer eyes bleed.
Marianne’s last blog post..I saw a Smart Car
Too funny! I agree 100%. The careless grammar/spelling trend is my biggest pet peeve, personally.
Cheers,
Kristina
http://hellinateacup.com
http://bespokebybrouhaha.com
Kristina’s last blog post..Shameless and shameful exorbitance
LOL! Hilarious. Even though your picture of the blood gushing from your head is somewhat grotesque, I enjoyed this post thoroughly.
Jasons last blog post..Web Design Trick: Javascript Column Heights
Did you ever consider that the blogger may have some evil intention to offend and abuse you? Maybe it is some sort of subconscious leftover childhood drama that he or she has not fully worked out and now it is being played out before your eyes and ears and any other unsuspecting victim… Just a thought… maybe I am wrong. Maybe they are just stupid.
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