Saturday, December 3, 2011

Book Blog Pet Peeves... via The Story Siren

Last month Kristi (The Story Siren, duh!) posted '10 things I dislike about your blog'. I thought I'd jump in and do a little ventilation myself. If you haven't read Kristi's post, go click that link and read it! 
NOTE: I'm going to risk sounding unappealingly pretentious in this post, so I hope you don't hate me after this!
Here are some of my pet peeves when it comes to reading book blogs:


1. NOISY WIDGETS
These score 10/10 on the annoying scale, and the thing that makes it worse is when I can't even find the bloody widget to turn off the sound! Kristi mentions this too, so every blogger should be wary of this. Automatic sound in widgets does not a good blog make. What it does is make me close your page faster than 100 fast things running a race.



2. COMMENT/WORD VERIFICATION
I comment on blogs a lot, so I know that most people don't realise that making your commenters verify themselves is not necessary - Blogger has a pretty good spam filter. If you get spam comments, they just don't show up/are automatically removed. Please untick that option in your settings, it will save everyone time. That being said, I still comply when commenting because I believe that giving someone feedback (even if only a single word) is more important (I appreciate every word of feedback I get, so hopefully I can rightly assume that other bloggers esteem comments as highly too). 


3. WHO ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
Normally after I read a post from a blog I visit for the first time, I immediately go to the 'About Me' section. I think most readers like to know some background about the person on the other side of the screen, so if your About Me section is hard to find, or not even on your home page, I might not come back again (let alone follow). Unless the quality of your posts redeems you. 


4. TEENY TINY FONT
This doesn't annoy me nearly as much as the first two. Small writing can be easily remedied by zooming in on the page (CTRL and +). But... it would just be nicer if everyone could use big, readable font to begin with. -winkity wink-


What are some of your pet peeves? 
Do I do anything that would be on your list of book blog no-no's?

2 comments:

Cass said...

I definitely agree with you! Although I can let the 'About Me' thing slip, since I don't check out every single blogger I follow.

YES YES YES to comment verification! I got rid of mine as soon as I knew I could. Before I made the switch to IntenseDebate, I would monitor what gets accepted into the comments section. I got maybe one spam message, but that's it.

A couple things about the CAPTCHA...when they make the letters and numbers are weird and hard to read! I just think to myself, WHAT'S THE FREAKING POINT? Being able to verify that you're human (and not robot) should be heaps simpler. I've never gotten over that. Also, when I do make comments with Captcha, sometimes my internet will conk out and it just won't load the Captcha sub-page (especially annoying if I didn't get the captcha right the first time since it's hard to read) which just really turns me off. I cannot tell you how many times I've just given up and 'X'ed off...

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