Southwest Virginia Blogs

The concept of design neutrality, is simply to make no statement with your design. In practice, it can very difficult. Design Neutral isn’t the lack of design, but design making little or no statement. The more content your design has, be it print or web design, the more difficult it is to not make a statement. In some cases, pulling off a design neutral project takes much more work than creating a distinct style. WordPress’ default themes make as good an effort at design neutrality as I’ve seen lately. Simple, unobtrusive, but not boring. the only thing they really say is “I can’t decide on a theme”. There’s nothing wrong with that. While I’d personally choose a clear and distinct design every time, some subjects, and some writers benefit from using a default theme. It gives them a “safe” platform from which to speak. It minimizes the ability of readers to read anything into the writing that doesn’t belong. It helps the reader take the words at face value, if it is at all possible.

The confusion comes when someone removes all traces of design, and calls it neutral. It isn’t neutral. Simplistic… minimalistic maybe. Devoid of style possibly, but not neutral. Google.com is simplistic. It makes a distinct stylistic statement though, just a very minimalistic one. For a search engine which phenomenal traffic, and little original content, it works. For a blog, or personal website, it wouldn’t work.

What does work, is a simple color palette with a few well placed graphics. Midrange colors that are neither too bright, or too dark. A simple layout that is organized and efficient. Clear and legible content in common fonts. These things will give you neutrality. When looking at a design, the word subtle should come to mind.If you’re working on a design, keep this in mind: Removal of all references to style isn’t Design Neutral, it’s undesigned.

The concept of design neutrality, is simply to make no statement with your design. In practice, it can very difficult. Design Neutral isn’t the lack of design, but design making little or no statement. The more content your design has, be it print or web design, the more difficult it is to not make a statement. In some cases, pulling off a design neutral project takes much more work than creating a distinct style. WordPress’ default themes make as good an effort at design neutrality as I’ve seen lately. Simple, unobtrusive, but not boring. the only thing they really say is “I can’t decide on a theme”. There’s nothing wrong with that. While I’d personally choose a clear and distinct design every time, some subjects, and some writers benefit from using a default theme. It gives them a “safe” platform from which to speak. It minimizes the ability of readers to read anything into the writing that doesn’t belong. It helps the reader take the words at face value, if it is at all possible.

The confusion comes when someone removes all traces of design, and calls it neutral. It isn’t neutral. Simplistic… minimalistic maybe. Devoid of style possibly, but not neutral. Google.com is simplistic. It makes a distinct stylistic statement though, just a very minimalistic one. For a search engine which phenomenal traffic, and little original content, it works. For a blog, or personal website, it wouldn’t work.

What does work, is a simple color palette with a few well placed graphics. Midrange colors that are neither too bright, or too dark. A simple layout that is organized and efficient. Clear and legible content in common fonts. These things will give you neutrality. When looking at a design, the word subtle should come to mind.If you’re working on a design, keep this in mind: Removal of all references to style isn’t Design Neutral, it’s undesigned.

I was feeling pretty good this morning, so I thought I’d risk life and limb today and review the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. According to Google Analytics, they have 6,380,170 hits as of this post.

Style:
Love it or hate it, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has a distinct style. Strongly black and red, with content in white columns, it incorporates a fluid three column layout on the home page, with two columns on interior pages. While the content columns float free of a containing background in a manner that I criticized Argghhh! for in my last review, it works here. The solid background and fluid layout act as the container, giving it the grounded look I thought was needed at Argghhh!.

The use of color is well done, with a strong black background and red used liberally as an accent. (The only liberal aspect you’re likely to find on this site.) Gray blockquotes with red outlines nicely compliment this simple color scheme. The links are blue, which manages to be clearly visible without being overpowering.

Graphics are well done in a very unified theme.

Structure:
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler is a WordPress site with an entirely CSS layout. The site structure is well done and should be represented well in any modern browser. Load time is high with 48.94 seconds on DSL or 157.08 seconds on 56K modem. This is quite high by blog standards and should be improved upon. A lot of the load time is caused by the high number of images. There were 72 images on the homepage when I tested it.

The CSS is well thought out and complete, though it could use a little clean up work. It has a some non-standard coding that should be fixed or removed.

While the site structure is good, the WordPress theme could use some minor updates. A quick validation check of the home page shows no true errors, but 442 warnings. Most of them are insignificant, but should be easy to fix too. A site with this level of traffic should really have this fixed. Most of them seem to be minor bits of extraneous code which could be easily removed from the base PHP of the theme. There is also some misuse of the CSS element ID which should be fixed. The ID element is used to describe a unique element which can occur once on a page, but is being used multiple times here.

While most if not all of the questionable code I’m seeing is not in the posts themselves, I’m concerned that it may affect RSS feeds and possibly the long term stability of the site. Without correction, what should be minor changes to the CSS or PHP could have much more dramatic effects than intended. The theme’s PHP and CSS should be carefully checked and cleaned of offending and extraneous bits.

Content:
It is politically off the charts to the right and pulls no punches. The authors’ vocabulary of obscene and profane language is vast and well used. This site doesn’t tolerate idiots of any stripe. While its authors will openly mock and ridicule anyone they feel is less than honest or sincere about their beliefs and/or politics, they are reasonably tolerant of polite disagreement. That said, their commenters are not always so polite.

What would I change:
I’d update the PHP to remove extraneous code.

I’d lower the number of images and optimize their use in an effort to decrease load time. Some improvement should be possible with little or no effect on the overall style.

I’d make minor changes to the CSS to make it more closely meet modern standards.

I’d add High Desert Wanderer to the blogroll, because… it appears to be tragically missing.

Summary:
While the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has a very distinct style, minor changes should be made to images, CSS and PHP in order improve load time and to make it more closely meet modern web standards.

As I said before, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has a distinct style. By intention or accident, a unique and very marketable brand has been created here. Great care should be taken to maintain this style while improvements are being made.

I’m not going to take the time for a full review of Tom DeLay.com, it’s just not worth my time, but I thought I’d point out a couple of problems.

Problem 1 - Boring!
The site has very little visual interest. The only graphic element in the design is a poorly done header image containing a picture of Tom DeLay. Yawn. If you don’t want to take the time to do something interesting, stick with a default template of some kind. Then at least we’ll know you don’t care.

Problem 2 - Comments
What I found objectionable about the comments is that there isn’t a single blogger’s URL showing anywhere. The only way to find out if the commenter is a blogger is to click on their name and go to a second page on the site which tells you if they left a URL. Annoying, and a little misleading. Showing a blogger’s URL is a simple way of putting the comments in the context of their other writing. By putting them one step away from the comments, you are removing this context.

In my experience, bloggers make up a significant percentage of commenters. Here though, I only managed to find two bloggers, William Teach and Becky, who left their URLs. It seems unlikely that all these are all people without blogs. Something odd is going on there. Either they’re being filtered (a note at the bottom of the comment page suggested this might be the case) or there is something odd about the way the site is functioning that is filtering out most of the URLs. Either way, the comments do not appear to be working as they should.

Problem 3 - Links
Far and away the biggest problem I see is the links in the content section of the blog. They’re hidden. Even in the small image I’ve placed above, the links should be at least partially visible. Sure you couldn’t read the text at that size, but the links should be bold, or italic, or colored. Anything to make them stand out from the regular text. They don’t stand out though. The text style of links is identical to the rest of the text unless you hover your mouse over a link. The image above contains three links in those first few paragraphs, but you’d have to hunt to find them.

The content links also have a flaw that’s a pet peeve of mine. Links are regular weight when there is no mouse over, but bold weight when hovered over. This causes the text to move whenever a link is “found”. Scroll your mouse down the page and each link passed over will make the text move. You might want to take Dramamine before you try that.

Summary:
This is a poorly designed site with little visual interest. The comment section is of questionable value, with commenter’s URLs placed one step away or missing. The link styles are horribly done. They are difficult to find inline and cause the text to shift in an annoying way when found. Everyone should strive to set an example. Unfortunately, TomDeLay.com is striving to be a bad example.

h/t to Raising Farrahzona » A Blog Roll I Will Never Be On for pointing out the site. I’d heard it existed, but hadn’t seen it yet.

I’m not going to take the time for a full review of Tom DeLay.com, it’s just not worth my time, but I thought I’d point out a couple of problems.

Problem 1 - Boring!
The site has very little visual interest. The only graphic element in the design is a poorly done header image containing a picture of Tom DeLay. Yawn. If you don’t want to take the time to do something interesting, stick with a default template of some kind. Then at least we’ll know you don’t care.

Problem 2 - Comments
What I found objectionable about the comments is that there isn’t a single blogger’s URL showing anywhere. The only way to find out if the commenter is a blogger is to click on their name and go to a second page on the site which tells you if they left a URL. Annoying, and a little misleading. Showing a blogger’s URL is a simple way of putting the comments in the context of their other writing. By putting them one step away from the comments, you are removing this context.

In my experience, bloggers make up a significant percentage of commenters. Here though, I only managed to find two bloggers, William Teach and Becky, who left their URLs. It seems unlikely that all these are all people without blogs. Something odd is going on there. Either they’re being filtered (a note at the bottom of the comment page suggested this might be the case) or there is something odd about the way the site is functioning that is filtering out most of the URLs. Either way, the comments do not appear to be working as they should.

Problem 3 - Links
Far and away the biggest problem I see is the links in the content section of the blog. They’re hidden. Even in the small image I’ve placed above, the links should be at least partially visible. Sure you couldn’t read the text at that size, but the links should be bold, or italic, or colored. Anything to make them stand out from the regular text. They don’t stand out though. The text style of links is identical to the rest of the text unless you hover your mouse over a link. The image above contains three links in those first few paragraphs, but you’d have to hunt to find them.

The content links also have a flaw that’s a pet peeve of mine. Links are regular weight when there is no mouse over, but bold weight when hovered over. This causes the text to move whenever a link is “found”. Scroll your mouse down the page and each link passed over will make the text move. You might want to take Dramamine before you try that.

Summary:
This is a poorly designed site with little visual interest. The comment section is of questionable value, with commenter’s URLs placed one step away or missing. The link styles are horribly done. They are difficult to find inline and cause the text to shift in an annoying way when found. Everyone should strive to set an example. Unfortunately, TomDeLay.com is striving to be a bad example.

h/t to Raising Farrahzona » A Blog Roll I Will Never Be On for pointing out the site. I’d heard it existed, but hadn’t seen it yet.

I’m not going to take the time for a full review of Tom DeLay.com, it’s just not worth my time, but I thought I’d point out a couple of problems.

Problem 1 - Boring!
The site has very little visual interest. The only graphic element in the design is a poorly done header image containing a picture of Tom DeLay. Yawn. If you don’t want to take the time to do something interesting, stick with a default template of some kind. Then at least we’ll know you don’t care.

Problem 2 - Comments
What I found objectionable about the comments is that there isn’t a single blogger’s URL showing anywhere. The only way to find out if the commenter is a blogger is to click on their name and go to a second page on the site which tells you if they left a URL. Annoying, and a little misleading. Showing a blogger’s URL is a simple way of putting the comments in the context of their other writing. By putting them one step away from the comments, you are removing this context.

In my experience, bloggers make up a significant percentage of commenters. Here though, I only managed to find two bloggers, William Teach and Becky, who left their URLs. It seems unlikely that all these are all people without blogs. Something odd is going on there. Either they’re being filtered (a note at the bottom of the comment page suggested this might be the case) or there is something odd about the way the site is functioning that is filtering out most of the URLs. Either way, the comments do not appear to be working as they should.

Problem 3 - Links
Far and away the biggest problem I see is the links in the content section of the blog. They’re hidden. Even in the small image I’ve placed above, the links should be at least partially visible. Sure you couldn’t read the text at that size, but the links should be bold, or italic, or colored. Anything to make them stand out from the regular text. They don’t stand out though. The text style of links is identical to the rest of the text unless you hover your mouse over a link. The image above contains three links in those first few paragraphs, but you’d have to hunt to find them.

The content links also have a flaw that’s a pet peeve of mine. Links are regular weight when there is no mouse over, but bold weight when hovered over. This causes the text to move whenever a link is “found”. Scroll your mouse down the page and each link passed over will make the text move. You might want to take Dramamine before you try that.

Summary:
This is a poorly designed site with little visual interest. The comment section is of questionable value, with commenter’s URLs placed one step away or missing. The link styles are horribly done. They are difficult to find inline and cause the text to shift in an annoying way when found. Everyone should strive to set an example. Unfortunately, TomDeLay.com is striving to be a bad example.

h/t to Raising Farrahzona » A Blog Roll I Will Never Be On for pointing out the site. I’d heard it existed, but hadn’t seen it yet.

There are almost as many reasons to quit blogging as there are to start, but I’ve noticed a trend. A significant number of people seem to quit blogging because of the time and effort that it takes. A perfectly valid reason. Blogging can be time consuming, and a lot of the time consuming parts aren’t very much fun. Consider how much time do you waste on spam comments and trackbacks for instance. How the annoying little details of links and quotes and making your post look like you want? What’s the solution? Here’s a short list of things that I use to make things go a little smoother.

• Hands free design - Choose a blog theme that is well thought out and low maintenance. You’re there to blog, not fix the site
• Install Spam Karma or some other quality spam protection. You shouldn’t have to fight with that junk.
• Firefox and Sage - Any good feed reader will work, but this is my choice. Allows for more reading in less time
• Performancing - A blogging tool that allows you to view a page, blog it, and get on with your life. I prefer the blog to draft option, which doesn’t post to the web, but saves as a draft that I can edit and post later.
• WordPress - Any good blogging software will do, but choosing one that doesn’t work for you makes things much more difficult than they have to be. Try a few, you’ll notice the difference.
• Dedicated e-mail account - Get an e-mail account just for your blog. Don’t give it out indiscriminately. When you don’t want to think about your blog, don’t check it.
• Blog about what you like. Having fun is the key to lasting as a blogger.

That should give you at least a start on streamline your blogging workflow. Sure it takes a few minutes to make some of those changes, but each one can save you time in the future. Then the time you devote to your blog can be spent… blogging.

Staying with the “starting from the top” theme, my second design review subject is Michelle Malkin’s Internet broadcast site, Hot Air. A powerhouse conservative blog which is currently averaging 67,917 hits per day.

Style:
The content packed layout was designed by The Blog Studio with a minimalist color scheme. It is a clean black and white design, with a moderate use of gray and some red highlights. Prominent advertising does not compete with content.

The overall style of the blog really quite good. The whimsical use of graphics and the Cox & Forkum logo in particular are well suited to the writing style of the blog.

The details of the site were not overlooked. The typography is well done, and a careful use of negative space makes the text flow nicely.

On a negative note, the blockquotes crowd their contained text on the top and bottom of each quote in the blog posts which I find a little annoying. They also crowd the left edge of the quotes in the comments, which I find more annoying. Both of those aspects are more a matter of personal taste than anything though. The CSS in general is actually fairly elegant.

Structure:
This WordPress powered site is a completely CSS layout as you’d expect. The structural framework appears very solid, and any modern browser would reliably represent it. Load time is high with 39.86 seconds on DSL or 127.88 seconds on 56K modem.This is a little more than twice as long as my site’s current theme which has a 17 second load time on DSL. This bandwidth drain is mostly caused by the high level of graphics. When I tested the load time, HotAir’s home page contained 66 images.

There is a little sloppy coding to clean up, but it seems to be almost exclusively related to advertising. This is an extremely minor point that would be very unlikely to affect anything. The blog posting code is very clean as are the resulting RSS feeds.

Content:
Content is a Conservative mix of politics and humor. It is graphically rich and updated frequently. In addition to the writing, three or four episodes of Vent, a Michelle Malkin vlog, are posted weekly.

Content is well presented in a clear and uncrowded layout. Very nice use of negative space with the blog posts.

What would I change:
The first thing I would try to change would be the load time. A difficult task that I’m not sure I would have much success with. This site is built around it’s use of graphics and the resulting load time would be difficult to improve upon. The load time definitely does not warrant changing the site style.

I’d make an attempt to clean up the advertisers code too, but this also could be futile. Small corrections are likely possible, but not all will be correctable. This is more annoying than anything. As a perfectionist at heart, I’d like things like this to be perfect, but it isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

Final summary:
This is a clever design, beautifully executed. It’s one of the best blog designs I’ve seen in terms of crafting the design to suit both the purpose and the authors. Well built, well organized, and just a touch of whimsy.

Evolvor has a short video clip on how to upload and place an image in WordPress. A nicely done and informative clip.

The following video is a short tutorial I found on You Tube about how to insert an image using Wordpress, for those of you who are just joining the WordPress army. - How to Insert an Image Using Wordpress | Evolvor

Get a lot of comments on your WordPress site? Set up an RSS feed of your comments so your commenters can keep keep up with the latest conversations. The default WordPress installation includes a comment feed, but doesn’t link it to the site. This means that while the feed exists, nobody can see it. In most cases it’s just a matter of adding a little code to your header, and your readers will be able to subscribe to your comments. The default location for the feed seems to be YourURL/wp-commentsrss2.php. In order to allow feed readers and browsers to see this feed, simply add this code to the header section of your site.

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="Comments" href="Your feed’s URL" />

RSS feeds are a simple way of allowing people to be notified of new content on your website. Using news aggregators like Newsgator and Bloglines, browsers with built in feed capability, or add-ons like Firefox’s Sage, your visitors can be notified whenever you post new content. Most blogging software like Blogger and WordPress creates these feeds for you. All you need to do is make sure that your feeds are visible and functioning. Are your feeds working?

Try subscribing, can you read them? If you’re having a problem subscribing, check your site source code. There should be a little bit of code in your head section that allows browsers and feed readers to identify your feed. It probably looks something like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/HighDesertWanderer" />

In both Firefox and IE7 you should also be able to identify a site with an RSS feed by the small icon displayed in the URL bar. If you don’t see that icon, your site might not be allowing your viewers to see your RSS feeds.

If your RSS feed is visible, but not readable, your problem likely originated with your blogging software. Try writing another post. It sounds like a stupid solution, but this will prompt the creation of a new RSS item and might also clean up any errors in the existing feed. If this doesn’t work, check your last 10-15 posts. Did you use any odd HTML, or special characters? Since your feed is created from your blog posts, removing any garbled code from your posts might fix your RSS. If the problem persists for more than 10-15 posts, consulting an expert would likely be your next option.

Verifying that your RSS feeds are working properly and visible to your readers is important. The people who subscribe to your site are people who have come to your site before, and want to visit again. You just need to let them know when!

I’ve been playing with a new WordPress theme for this site for a while. It’s seems to be ready, so I’ll put it up shortly. Please forgive any chaos that ensues when it first goes up. No matter how much you test a theme, when it first goes live there always seems to be some little quirk. More often than not it’s a browser not wanting to refresh properly, but I’ve been known to make an error once in a while.