03/20/2003
This is a review of burning-angel.diary-x.com.
Content - 48/75pts.
[-]Execution - 25/45pts. Your very first entry hinted right away at the indifference you'd feel for the journal, with the descriptions of yet "another uneventful day". (If it's so dull, why do you bother describing it?)
Most of the entries in 2001 seemed to be on the same train, off to diary yawn land. Day-to-day blog stuff. On this entry, you say that you "can't even concentrate on one thought long enough to write about it," leaving me wondering why you spend the time on it then. Just go to bed. I want to go to bed.
Finally, I stumbled upon an entry that wasn't completely useless - what's this, submission to angst! Letting your emotions out into the world so they don't stew and grow moss inside of you. Unfortunately, you jumped without any transitions from chemistry to people's influences on other people (this seemed irrelevant to the issue at hand, whatever that issue was). And then onto "you need a job," and then suddenly a dream sequence. I was whirled about at a brisk pace.
I found this entry didn't pull me from one event to another in your harried teenage style, but it was vaguely angst-filled. Who hated whom? What happened? I tried the previous entry, and I found it just as vague.
Listen, everyone has problems. Wah, I've no friends, and wah, no one understands me. Okay. We get it. But for some reason, the voyeuristic tendencies that we all feel are aroused not just for repetitions of "wah, I've no friends," but for those repetitions using names and descriptions of drunken trips to Fort Walla Walla, oh, that's a funny name, and I've no friends. Get it? So then we'll cry with you. But now, it's just blah, another angst-filled teenager. Skip-er-oo. I've read it already. (Don't think that you do this often? How about here. And here, and here and here.)
These are fine for introspection. Okay. Cool. But these aren't fine for other people to read, especially people who do not know you. And I'm grading you on how enjoyable your diary is for people who do not know you (like me), and I find that you're lacking.
Oh, oh, but, what's this? Why, an entry to which I have a reply. You said that you have "much better things to be doing" than having sex. What? What better things? This entry was fine. I don't really approve of that "How was that Melissa?" bit, as if Melissa is the only person who ever reads it, which she is so not.
I thought that the quality of your entries would improve, like your grammar did, but unfortunately, I was still greeted with pointless entries (read it over. Do you even remember what it was about?) and plenty of newsy randomness, all of which we (or I) could have done without.
What did I want? Entries like this, where you whine, sure, but whine clearly and so that fellow teenagers can follow along and nod and commiserate. I don't know what changed. That was a January 2003 entry. I skipped around in 2002, reading two or three from each month, and I didn't find any that came close to capturing my interest like that one did.
And then, of course, your friend Jeff committed suicide, making your entries emotional and moving. I think the diary began to mean more to you, or something, or who knows what.
The entries can never magically be interesting to your readers if they are not interesting to you yourself. It seemed to be a chore during 2001 and most of 2002. Maybe you should stop registering so many names at Diary-X, eh?
[-]Grammar/Mechanics - 6/10pts. The July '02 entry was the one in which you began actually using the shift key. All of the entries before that, in 2002 and 2001, used no capitalized letters at all. I developed multiple twitches.
College will be much more fun if you know the difference between "its" (possessive pronoun) and "it's" ("it is"). You make the mistake here: it won't do it on it's own.
Also, Jeff hanged himself. He didn't "hung" himself. And, by the way, what is the final analysis of your Jeff-dreams?
[-]Readability - 7/10pts. In entries that are interesting, you'd a bad habit of using really long paragraphs. Most of your readers are short attention span sporting American teenagers. Bear that in mind when you don't use paragraph breaks. Other than that, you were readable. Kudos.
[-]Style - 10/10pts. I can't really find anything to complain about... I'm a little worried about myself...
Layout - 8/10pts.
[-]Aesthetics - 5/5pts. It's pretty. Very pretty.
[-]Navigability/Legibility - 3/5pts. First point: Your archive pages are for the entire year. And then you have to scroll down to the bottom to go from year to year. Navigation would have been easier if you had one archive page that offered a method to get to all of the years at once. And if you split up the pages into half years, maybe. Or you don't have to. You didn't really have an excessive number of entries.
Second point: Your font is too small. Your font is too small. Your font is TOO SMALL. Do you use IE? You know then that view >> text size >> larger does nothing if the page uses CSS to set font sizes. So. My eyes hurt.
Contact - 5/5pts.
Updates - 2/5pts. I have a rather loose rule about ten to fifteen entries a month. April, May, and August 2002 were the only months you broke ten. Some months, you only had two or three. Sorry, pal. Maybe you shouldn't try to keep so many online journals. Many of your entries lamented about how you were too busy to update. And it shows.
Errors - 2/5pts. You coded this yourself, so I'm not going to look at your source code. I'm just going to whine, and then you'll magically know how to fix everything that I whine about.
On your 2001 archive page the width of the box with the links jumps to be about fifty pixels wide if my mouse goes over a link. I don't know why it does this, but it's eternally frightening. I'm innocently about to click on a link, and POW, the link disappears. It's gone about six or seven hundred pixels south, and then I grumble as I scroll to catch up with it. I'm not sure what you did to make it do that. I use IE 6.0. There shouldn't be this sort of problem.
I know that you didn't code it for Netscape because the image didn't show up at all, which means your image map didn't show up, which means I couldn't navigate. And your archived pages... nothing at all showed up. I got a blank blue screen. Interesting.
Your diary works perfectly in Opera. I clapped my hands and began surfing. (Unfortunately for you, very few, if any, of your visitors use Opera. So I'd look into fixing these errors.)
The imood thing doesn't seem to be working, not that I care. I would get rid of imood. Stop perpetuating Internet pointlessness, you know?
There's a dead link on this page.
Total - 65/100pts. And that's "Mediocre." Have a great day. Or a mediocre one. Or whatever you please.
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