Bad Blog Trends

The fairly recent trend of placing google ads on blogs is confusing to me. They are not attractive and I haven’t heard anyone say they are a great income stream, so… I don’t get it.
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Glad to see I’m not the only one who hates those massive pop-ups giving information about the link. What’s wrong with a simple ‘title’ attribute, huh? I also agree with the Google ads point. To me it just seems arrogant, like ‘my site gets so much traffic I have to display adverts to pay for my bandwidth.’ 90% of the time this isn’t true, you are just being a poseur.

I would have to say that the biggest issue I have with blogs, beyond poor color schemes, is that when someone post when they have nothing to say, just to have a post for that day. I know that’s what blogs are for, but I would think they could just wait for when they have something creative or inspiring to type. Of course, that would probably mean that no blogs would be written. ??
How about a rule that if you don’t have more than a paragraph to put down, then don’t blog. I guess that rule would require that someone would know how to type a complete sentence.
I guess we should just live and let live.
And, I agree, that strike through visited link thing is highly annoying.

Bad Blog Trends… I see… To me blog is very personal. If person made his/herblog and it looks like it does, it means (s)he likes it that way. Leave it to the author and let it be so. It’s his/her personal blog, (s)he have his own interests/style/feeling of what (s)he likes. How can any of you judging others? Look at yourself first and think of how many people might dislike your style (just because you are xhtml frak / just because you care only about design / just because you post only about politic / just beacuse your site must be super duper fast and have no graphics at all / just because… ).
If everyone follow same rules, we’ll have same looking blogs all over which will be very boring imho. We are all different with different tastes…
Leave it to the authors. It’s their blog.

I take issue with folks who do not think design is important. If you want people to actually read the thing then the articles need to be presented in an accessible, useable, attractive way. Some blogs just overwhelm me with too much stuff.
There is no indication of what is important or what is new. Or where there is more. And a disproportionate mix of graphics and text is a killer. Just my two cents.

Oddly the very last of my validation errors has just this minute been eliminated. I had two errors in the comments driving me nuts. But thank you for kindly ??
pointing it out. My e is blog at atthe404 dot com.

Heck I am just pleased it is Ok in my FF. I am still working up my legacy browser friendly css but I have got probs with the 3d. . I’ve still got the css in my index temporarily as well. But IE 6? That is a worry. I had tested it myself on that handy IECapture site. Now I just need time to fix it. BTW my newly installed FF is still not rendering your bg. It must be either the png or the Mozilla “goodies” . XP is a load of junk anyway.;) TY for your interest. ??

BTW my newly installed FF is still not rendering your bg

Weird… I have no idea why… I had about 400 unique visitors by now and you’re the only one reporting that bug ?? I’ld like to see some screenshots if you can make’em (preferrably so I can see whole window (with browser window itself), not only site). Thanks.
Also that screenie I’ve posted. I think you had it because of the trackback link, it was too long. You have to make sure it’s on its own line, or do how I did : Make link called “Trackback” and link it to the link you have displayed before ??
And those “mozilla goodies” are just rounded corners and transparency (looks awesome in FF/Moz).

I have my site listed at photoblogs.org, so sometimes I go over there and browse through the blogs looking for interesting photography, but mostly I just get distracted wondering how the hell all of these people can be useing the <I>exact</I> same template. A few colors change, and some are more elegant than others, but for the most part they’re all the same. Now, I’m sure lots of people feel that ‘it’s the content that’s really important’, and this is true, for the most part, but design reflects on content. Designs that are nothing more than the default template and a few awkward color choices, are boring, and more often than not boring websites have boring content.

@maxt. We are off topic here I know. The screen shot of my blog as it renders in IE 6 is : here. I have not edited it since you posted and it looks just fine to me.
Although my site is a prototype, and I make no claims to any type of accessibility other than being xhtml compliant, it would seriously concern me if IE 6 viewers were being inconvenienced even temporarily. It uses float and nested divs, not the VB hack so it should be OK anyway. Possibly you posted a ss of 5.5? Or maybe this is an XP thing? Very mysterious don’t you think ? Thanks for your input. It is always worth having a look. You are currently showing two validation errors on your own site. Don’t know if they are scrambling the bg. I have seen this phenomena before. Wierd.

*sigh*
i don’t see the problem on Root’s site as in the image (IE 6 on winxp)
and i’m not sure what this background rendering problem on firefox is supposed to be on Max’s site…

I’ve posted a bit of a long post on this thread at my site : https://www.thunderbyrd.net/index.php?p=28
I felt it was too long to post here. Comments & flames invited.

I find this thread interesting for its complete lack of vision as to what the original post was concerned with, which was bad blog trends. Trends are things that the masses embrace over time. Some design elements can be trends in blogging, but bad grammar and bad spelling isn’t a blog trend, it’s a cultural trend.
No one here has mentioned any of the more interesting trends that I see: The increasing commercialization of blogs, whether it is Weblogs, Inc. or Nike paying Gawker to create blogs around Nike brands. Or how about the trend toward mass-utilization? A number of technology writers point to blogs as the next personal web space for the common user, right up there after their e-mail address.
That said, I don’t find any alarming or bad blog trends that merit serious discussion at this point.

Yeah, this is mostly just a personal pet peeve list, its not really identifying trends. In fact, in some cases two people are claiming to notice completely opposite trends. Someone complains about people not using a:visited on long lists of links, and someone else complains about everyone using a:visited. If it was really some sort of trend instead of just little personal preferences, then we’d be seeing the same thing.
I think that, in general, increasing knowledge of CSS means that web usability and accessibility has gone UP, not down. You can use CSS to seriously mung up a website and make it hard to use, but it is also easy to use basic CSS to make a website very easy to use and very accessible, and thats what most people choose to do. The web has become a lot more friendly in the last few years, partially because people are experimenting with their weblogs, and then filtering those developments out into the rest of the web world. I don’t get bent out of shape when I see a ‘Valid XHTML’ link and the website isn’t valid because of one or two little errors, because at least they know that validation is in some way important. Three years ago it was rare to see a validation link, let alone any knowledge at all of standards. Let the weblog world find out what works (and what doesn’t, like we are talking about in this thread) and then the ‘rest of the world’ can benefit from our wanton experimentation.
peace,
sam

Sam, good post. I like the idea that blogging has increased our ability to use .css and produce valid code. Now if only M$ would do the same. Ooh… my bad, did I say that out loud? *snickers*