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?