03/11/2003
This is a review of gmk.diaryland.com (now defunct).
Content - 30/75pts.
[-]Execution - 15/45pts. Are we muddling through life rather vaguely? Do we feel uncomfortable with life? Did you read somewhere that "less is more"? Sometimes, less is simply just less.
When I started reading your diary, I thought (without sarcasm), oh, how clever. You write in fragments to show your emotion. And you do it well sometimes. Sometimes. Like here.
I was pleased and happy. And I was so glad to be reading a diary that I enjoyed reading. But then my neck began to hurt (see the layout section) and then my head began to hurt, and then I began to feel like I've read this before. Or heard this before.
Oh, you know, heard it in the hallway at school, even whined it myself at times. The homework and the tests and the essays. Wah. But you're downright cruel with your annoyance with school, and cruel with no justification, such as towards your father. That entry made me wonder about the sincerity of this entry. Not that you don't love your father or that you don't hate war. Oh, I'm sure that you are passionate.
Cough.
I'm a liar! And I get the feeling that you're lying at me! The deceit sickens one!
I thought that maybe it was the headache and the squinting that made me so bitter, so I began to read your entries in Notepad. (How's that for a beautiful layout. Please, do read that section for more details!)
You are ecstatic and happy here, but because you didn't tell me what you were talking about, I began to get irritated. I was sure you were going to be talking about SEX!!! but you kept saying this was like this and this was like that, and I thought, enough with the similes, bring out the sultry details! But no sultry details for me.
And then, with shaking knees and a tumbling tummy (this makes me want to change "knees" for "shins"), I suffered through a description of a rather vulgar dream. You colorfully peppered it with lots of profanity. You said "fuck" so many times, I couldn't tell who was trying to rape whom, so I cheered for everyone. I felt that it would be the safest route for me.
You know what? You could read this entry, and I think that it would encompass everything you ever write about in your diary. You do that a lot. You have a lot of entries that are exactly like that. Reading your diary is a lot like shoe shopping with somebody's mother. Every shoe she looks at is exactly like the ones she has at home. My neck screamed for me to stop.
And a quotation (I corrected the conventions so that we can read it more easily.) from your world of teenage angry-angst: I am watching "Dawson's Creek." And please before you lose all respect for me and never visit my diary again, remember that everyone is allowed that one little dumb thing that makes them happy.
WRONG! Not here, you're not! And, no, you're not allowed to be "narrssacistic" (yes, you really did spell it like that, in the entry about the ACT score, but I can't seem to find it, and I don't feel like attempting to wade through the site again, my neck! - again, check layout for more details) if you can't spell it. No. No, you can't.
And you aren't allowed to be vulgar and disgusting sometimes and pretty at others. It makes me feel as muddled and confused as you obviously are.
It's as though the more entries I read, the more confused I became. Eventually, I threw in my towel. You had me fooled at first
[-]Grammar/Mechanics - 5/10pts. Wow. Heard of the SHIFT key? And the apostrophe? You type your diary entries like this is an IM conversation. (But then where's the block button? Ha, ha.) Please stop that. It's difficult enough to read your entries (refer to layout!) without also having to mentally add in sentence breaks.
[-]Readability - 5/10pts. You love a lot of men. A lot and a lot of men for such a small person. (Maybe I shouldn't say "men." I should say "teen males." Or something.) I had trouble keeping track of them all. Also, you allow your profanity to get in the way of your meaning once or twice, which is a capital offense, little girl. Because FUCK is a beautiful word. And because you shouldn't abuse it. (Also, you never use any other vulgarities than fuck. I don't think I saw "shit" or "asshole" once. Weird.)
[-]Style - 5/10pts. I liked your style at first, like I said, but less in large quantities makes a reader nauseated. My head began to whirl and I began to wish you'd use adjective clauses sometimes. I like adjective clauses. I get tired of reading short, choppy sentences, especially if they aren't deliciously funny.
I know that you were trying to be deep and emotional, and I know that short sentences can shove your feelings into other people's faces quickly. However, there is the sense that your feelings are forced. You write like "God, I'm so pissed off, God, I feel like my libido is going to make me burst, GOD, I have to write this paper" in every single entry. I began to suspect you really actually cared for none of those things.
But I really liked your style at first.
Layout - 4/10pts.
[-]Aesthetics - 3/5pts. My initial reaction: I agree. And also mouth-watering. Your site is well-designed and juicily original.
But then I read about forty entries. And I began to want to scream. It detracted considerably from how aesthetically pleased my eyes were by your site. I discuss this in more detail below.
I'm also a bit confused about what this layout has to do with you personally. You like oranges and green things? You seem too angst-filled to like oranges and pretty baby blue. And you seem too annoyingly studious to like oranges and pretty baby blue. And you seem too sexually active to like oranges and pretty baby blue. Incongruous.
[-]Navigability/Legibility - 1/5pts. While your diary's layout is adorable for the casual reader, it's a bugger for the SERIOUS reader, the one who tries to read every single entry. I tried, and I wanted to give up quickly, much too quickly. The problem arises when one tries to access entries through your archived pages. If a person reads an entry, then goes back to the archives, reads another entry (by skipping a few), and then reads another entry, the person finds herself filled with murderous rage because her neck hurts. I have a large screen and my monitor and browser are very forgiving to bad code, but your code is not very bad at all. It's the design that's lacking.
The reason my neck hurt so much is because your window-in-a-window bit only allows for six lines. Some of your entries are over thirty and forty lines. The scrolling is difficult because the scrollbars are invisible. Gah. Lots of gah.
Your archives page is even more annoying because there are up to sixty lines. I was pulling out hair.
And your font is not friendly on the eyes. I took to copying and pasting your entries into a word processor so that I could read them comfortably. (I thought I would be blinded by the baby blue.)
To fix it, get rid of that window-in-a-window thing. Just kill it. That way, your entire entry will show up on the entire screen, like it's supposed to, and we can scroll like normal people, and our necks won't hurt. (I think it's a psychological effect, my neck hurting like that. I felt like I was squinting and straining, so my neck obediently began to hurt.) I was also going to tell you to get rid of the font and the baby blue, but you probably like them...
And navigation? Can't stand it. It's cute, but the purpose of navigation isn't to be cute. It's to be navigable. Your navigation link titles were "n," "o," "m," "l/r," and so on. That's annoying. I know that you think it's self-evident, but it's really not. I felt all sorts of Internet unsavvy as I scratched my head, wondering what "l/r" was. (I didn't want to accidentally stumble upon a picture of Mr. Hard History Teacher's underpants and so on.)
Contact - 5/5pts. You had something or other.
Updates - 5/5pts. I can't bear to check your archives one more time, so I'm just going to assume that you've got the minimum fifteen a month.
Errors - 3/5pts. Font on this page is smaller, accidentally, I'm sure. Also, the window-in-a-window thing does not work in Opera. Care? You should. Your site looks terrible in Opera. It makes you look like a sloppy programmer, which I'm sure you're not. I'm sure you're just an angst-filled programmer.
Total - 47/100pts. I'm a little dazed. And mostly unimpressed. Maybe I was just jealous of your ACT score though. Wow! You're a FRESHMAN? She got a 28, by the way, friends. Isn't that amazing? And you're probably working on a history paper right now, and I have to say to you, commiserating, mumble-mumble, something-or-other. Oh, right. High school rots.
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