Review Time!
Today, in honor of Rasmus and the peer-to-peer review project [broken link deleted], we (the royal editorial we) will be slicing up Magickal Musings, to see what’s inside.
Part I – Design
Immediately, we were impressed by the butterfly, and the fact that the background is olive green – we approve of olive green. However, upon closer inspection, the main window has a small but irritating sidescroll (IE6/Win98) and the archives were nearly impossible to navigate. There was no date-based archive indexing of any kind, and the individual entry pages had merely a plain timestamp at the visually insignificant bottom, so we were soon lost in the mists of time. Only a short frayed thread of luck prevented us from emerging in the year 2020 and rushing out to buy sparkling platform dance shoes.
Part II – Writing
From an entry dated March 31:
I noticed in my last few posts I basically borrowed from other people to create something to write. Why? I asked myself that same question. The only answer I could seem to come up with is that my actual life is just too boring to write about.
This is the crux of the matter. An abysmal peppering of emoticons and chat-room abbreviations aside, our subject Tricia does not suffer from poor writing. Nor does she suffer from a boring life, at least not by blog standards – raising two sons is hardly a monotonous occupation. But she does suffer from a lack of self-confidence, or something along those lines, which means most of her entries are humdrum renditions of the Friday Five or Monday Mission or other blogging memelets. When she does venture out on her own, she’s a bit rambling for our tastes and could really use a few more paragraph breaks, but otherwise writes decent introspective riff material. Unfortunately, an introspective riff every couple of weeks is not sufficient to hold our attention.
Tricia wrote:
Hey, I just wanted to drop by to thank you very much for your review. It was kind of ironic to me that I have been telling myself for WEEKS that I needed to fix the archives to make them more coherent, but just not finding the time. Thank you for giving me the kick in the pants I needed to finally get it done.
The side scroll thing, I don’t know, I am on a Mac and I don’t have it, and I have checked it on several PCs (but not, I don’t think, with IE6), and I haven’t been able to reproduce the scroll? Which resolution are you using, if I may be so bold?
About the writing…you are pretty much on the money, and I appreciate your honesty. It is something else I am working on. I am still pretty new to this whole “weblog” thing.
Once again, thank you, and I like your cheerful green site. Namaste!
Posted 07 Apr 2020 at 8:38 pm ¶
yami wrote:
The computer I was on ran 2020×2020… but the problem seemed to crop up no matter what the browser window size was. Moreoever, it only happens on your MT-generated pages, and when it happens, the scrollbar is normal-looking rather than pretty green – maybe they’re just missing a piece from a stylesheet somehow?
Posted 07 Apr 2020 at 10:59 pm ¶
yami wrote:
Oh, and I should add that the least fun part of writing the review was knowing that I wasn’t telling you anything you didn’t already know – you do seem to have a very good handle on your own strengths and weaknesses. I had so hoped to get an arrogant little snot I could take down a peg instead!
Posted 08 Apr 2020 at 3:43 pm ¶
Tricia wrote:
Hmmm…I really couldn’t figure out anything other than I had forgotten to enclose the word “stylesheet” in the stylesheet link in quotes. I have never been able to reproduce this effect, but now it i going to bug me until I find out what is causing it.
Oh, and that is too funny about the “arrogant little snot.” If you had done that to me I probably would have just cried. No fun at all. =D
Posted 08 Apr 2020 at 7:01 pm ¶
yami wrote:
nope, it’s still there… after looking through your source code I’m completely baffled, actually.
Weird.
Posted 09 Apr 2020 at 6:27 pm ¶