03/18/2003
This is a review of miss-allis.diaryland.com (now defunct).
Content - 32/75pts.
[-]Execution - 20/45pts. Do you want to know what I did today? My brother left the house, but I didn't get out of bed to say good-bye to him, I mumbled something from bed. During the middle part of the day, I traversed the city, learning music and purchasing toiletries. I like toiletries because I'm American and I like to be clean. The latter part of the day was spent making a musical instrument for a class. The even more latter part of the day, I idled at the computer or behind a book. And that was my day.
And even I don't care. I don't care. Do I care? No. I don't care. Do I write like a moron? No. Do I write coherently, intelligently, succinctly, and with a clear, lucid style? Sure. Was I interesting? HELL NO.
That was boring! That was dull.
Welcome to your diary. Here's how it worked. I read your most recent entry. I read the entry before that. Then I read one more entry before that. Then I found your earliest entries, and I read the first five. Then I picked this one. (It doesn't matter which one I pick. You write consistently.)
Okay, so now for an in-depth analysis of bertiebotts.html.
In the very first paragraph, you went from snow day to your awake/sleep habits to Titanic to I hate Americans. Whoa. Okay, see, I know that you have ADHD, but, golly, girl, the point is to try to control your urges, not give into them. The diary should help you become more normal, not make you more scatterbrained and annoying. (And scatterbrained teenagers are exactly that - scatterbrained. Ha, ha! I bet you thought that I was going to write something different, like "annoying"!)
The first sentence of the second paragraph seemed to indicate that your friends hate touching snow. When I read it again, I noticed that you really meant that your friends love snow. Write more simply. Your meaning is lost in your annoyingly convoluted sentences. And you know what those convoluted sentences are? You got it! Convoluted!
I began fidgeting, really, in your second paragraph. You scored well in hockey? What do you mean? In the street? What teacher's good side? I thought that school was cancelled. Who the heck is "Sparacio"?
Would your English teacher have been "too ugly" if he'd asked where your chinchilla was, instead of your friend? Who's Smyth? (I'm beginning to sense points dropping away in "readability.")
The last sentence, "cute little man he is," does that refer to Smyth? Or your cousin? Or your English teacher? Your chinchilla?
In the last paragraph (which, of course, teenage female that this person is, had nothing to do with any of the other paragraphs), you simultaneously "thought a lot" and "[did] nothing." Believe me. I'm guffawing at this very minute. (Well, I was guffawing when I wrote this. I may or may not be guffawing as you are reading.)
Most of your entries run along that line. Not anything really bad about them, but nothing that is compelling.
On apathy.html, you made the proclamation that you have very few friends who are short because you dislike short people. Because they're short. This is funny. I'm amused. It's clever social commentary - commentary about racism and sexism, all by analogy. (Of course, the girl never said anything of the sort. I read this into it. Oh, well.)
Other than that entry, your diary mostly said "I'm bored. I have homework. Also, I'm bored." And so on.
[-]Grammar/Mechanics - 0/10pts. Mostly you have a bugger of a time with spelling. Why don't you run your entries through a word processor to check for spelling before you post? If you'd done that, I wouldn't be making fun of you right now.
For example, "I sit with these group of Italians, who have an odd sort of commadery..."
And from the same page: "when the situation arrises"
And if you're so smart, why can't you spell received? (You misspell it several times, so I know that it isn't a typo.)
Either you get it or you don't. No partial here. And you had an error or two in every single entry.
You should stop using the word "thusly." It's a real word, sure, but it makes you sound silly and pretentious (and it isn't THAT correct of a word). Instead, try saying "this way" or "like this." In any case, the way you use it in that sentence, you ought to have said "for this reason," making "thusly" completely incorrect.
And here: "Maybe I should be a physitrist." Imagine a psychiatrist who can't spell the word! No amount of fancy diplomas'd get you patients.
And it's not just spelling that suffers through failing to reread your entries before posting. Take this sentence: "because I (used to be) a very social." And it ends like that.
[-]Readability - 7/10pts. Remember the entry I dissected? Sparacio? Smyth? I have no idea who they were. Your diary shouldn't be an inside joke.
[-]Style - 5/10pts. The average teenage pain style. I'm going to make it a habit to say "teenage pain style." It's like Puritan plain style (scroll to the bottom of the page for the definition), like I've said before, only for teenagers and the pain and, oh, the angst.
And you're poetic, and you use words incorrectly. For example, in this entry, you say that March is "far better than droll February." And since when was February droll?
Layout - 7/10pts.
[-]Aesthetics - 4/5pts. I didn't like the emphasis of the diary being on your image (which, of course, doesn't show up for most of the entries - refer to "errors"). I like for the TEXT to be at the top, not the image. No one cares about your image. Consider making it a table, with the image to one side and your text to the other.
[-]Navigability/Legibility - 3/5pts. I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but I'm blind. And your font is too small. What? Your font is too small. Huh? Your font is TOO SMALL.
Your archived entries had titles like "01," "02," and "03." Right. Those aren't very helpful titles. Change those to "March 2003" or something of the sort.
Contact - 5/5pts.
Updates - 5/5pts.
Errors - 3/5pts. When I first read your diary, I found that on this archive page a March entry shows up, even though the other entries are from December and November. You fixed that error before I could post the review. However, the problem lies in how you are archiving your entries. You might want to move the December/November entries to another older.html page, and let the March ones go to older.html, since that's Diaryland's default. Does that make sense?
You should archive away from older.html. Older.html should always hold your most recent entries.
And, there is no image here. The image doesn't show up, in fact, until the February 25th entry.
In Netscape, your scroll thing (window-in-a-window) doesn't work. And guess what? It looks MUCH better. In most of these reviews, I've been telling people how to fix the scroll thing, but I'm not going to tell you because I think it looks THAT much better in Netscape. It's easier to read, easier to navigate. It's just much better. (Go download Netscape and see for yourself.) I'd suggest taking out the div tag completely, take away the scroll. It doesn't add to your site.
Total - 52/100pts. Solidly bad. But who cares? Certainly not you. Hey! I'm apathetic too. (I thought it'd make you happy to see me pitifully plugging my site. Or, it'd give you a chance to see what I do with my free Diaryland space. And, it'll give you a chance to search for typos.)
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