I don’t care if you are Jeanette, Katharine or Amelia. STOP FUCKING SPAMMING ME. 4 emails in 10 days? Really. I will join your damn site when I want to but I will not be fucking pestered into doing so.

Also, you’ve got your own swanky domain and everything so I assume you at least want to appear somewhat professional, right? Well, here’s a fucking clue: don’t spam people from fucking free Gmail accounts. Jesus, don’t they teach that stuff in Online Spamming Marketing 101?

Fucking Annoyed,
Lis

ETA: Those of you who’re going to check out the spam machine anyway, read the damn TOS before you submit anything. Interesting discussion about them on Blog Catalog.

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?

Here’s a newsflash for you. James Blunt is NOT a freakin’ musical genius. He’s just some stupid bloke with a shitty voice who writes shitty songs with shitty lyrics and shitty music. They are not “wistful”, “moving” or”inspiring”. They do not “tug at the heart strings” unless it’s the murderous one. They’re just stupid emo shit, and not even good emo shit at that. His voice is not “interesting”, “beautiful” or “haunting”, at least not in a good way anyway. It’s fucking whiny. He’s not a bloody tormented tragic lovelorn poet. He’s not even particularly hot. In short, he’s not a fucking beautiful unique snowflake.

His songs are absolutely music to my ears, you know, the kind that sounds like fingernails scratching across a blackboard. It makes me want to stick a finger into my eye and give my brains a swirl. The songs also rank right at the top together with “My Heart Will Go On” on my list of songs that put me in a stabbity mood. Heaven.

And now he’s back to assault my senses once more. Somebody get him off my fucking radio.

No love,
Lis

If you’re going to pimp your site on my blog, at least have the decency to pretend to be interested in what I’ve posted and make a content appropriate comment instead of just HELO CUM VISIT MY SIGHT PLZ. This is not a fucking blog directory where you just dump your link here thinking I’ll add you to my blogroll.

No love,
Lis

Edit: Now if MyBlogLog doesn’t come up with an option to disable this spamity spam, I’m going to have to force someone on the team to visit a website with blinding, flashing, seizure-inducing colours, obnoxious page transitions and embedded audio that plays My Heart Will Go On. The remixed techno version. On loop.

Edit strikes back: Think I’m the only one grumbling about this spanking new feature? Check out Avi’s post “MyBlogLog Mass Messaging – Swallow Spam or Die“. He also included links to other bloggers who’re also gnashing their teeth over this feature brought to you by popular demand. Really, all these people demanding this feature, do they have mailboxes that look like this “xksodfikas@gmail.com” and send polite emails to decent folks asking them if they want their “johnsons enlarged”?

Websites with embedded audio. Whoever the hell thought embedding audio on a website is a great idea has obviously never been scared shitless by sudden loud music blaring from his speakers at 3 a.m. in the morning. Not funny.

Website layouts with blinding colour combinations. Here’s the thing. I surf to have fun, relax and generally enjoy myself. I DO NOT surf to give myself bleeding eyes. Fire engine red, bright orange and lime green do not make soothing colour combinations. See, if your friend told you your site looks awesome? He’s totally lying. Buy a clue. Consult a colour wheel.

Page transitions. It’s probably cool if you’re 13 years old with a Xanga site but it’s also Very Annoying. Just don’t do it.

Google is your best friend. I go to all these forums and see people asking all these stupid questions (omg ive neva seen a green apple wat iz it? lololol) that can probably be answered with about 3 seconds of googling. If you’re smart enough to figure out how to post in a forum, then you should be smart enough to just fucking google it.

Considering that there’re probably more stupid people on this planet than there are sheep in New Zealand, I should perhaps serialise my stupid people rants. I’m sure I’ll never run out of material.

1) Stupid people who insist on rushing into the lift before you can even get out.
2) Now replace “lift” with “train”
3) Stupid people who become rooted to the spot after getting off the bus therefore blocking my exit. MOVE YOUR ASS.
4) Stupid people who insist on reading the newspapers UNFOLDED in a crowded lift with zero elbow space. Dude, your paper is in my face.
5) Stupid people who have no qualms about sharing their bad taste in music with the entire train.
6) Stupid DJs who play that “You’re Beautiful” song by whathisface on the radio 893283743 times a day.