So, strap me down, it's time for my lobotomy*

After the train wreck I've seen today, I feel I owe the Canuckistani an apology. So, Canuckistani guy, please forgive me for beating you so harshly last week. You aren't so bad. I've seen teh suck now, and it isn't pretty.

My task this week was to review Weird Cake, a blog by AriadnePhD, who is bi-polar. Her blog tracks her life.

To start:
This blog made my head hurt. There is just SO MUCH SHIT GOING ON ALL OVER THE PLACE. It hurts me to look at it. Thank god for adderall. I didn't take it earlier this week, and there was no fucking way I could have reviewed this blog without its stabilizing influence. NO FUCKING WAY.

The template:
Ariadne: I appreciate the symbolic significance of "the scream." But setting it as the background for your text does not work. It hurts your readers. It distracts from your words. You need to set your template to put a solid color behind your blog text. Maybe you can use "The Scream" to create a header graphic to get your point across without making your blog virtually unreadable.

Further, the scream stops midway down your page in IE. So, half of your blog has "the Scream" as its background graphic, and half of it has a white background. That might be okay except that you've set your font to a shade of light gray that is barely legible against the white.

You've tried to add colors to your already busy as hell template with your links and titles in green and yellow (respectively). It's just ugly, sweetie. Don't do that. Please. I beg of you. The colors don't coordinate well and it's just hideous.

Your font face is too large even considering the 1028 x 768 orientation of my screen and it's Times New Roman. Ugh.

And the three-column busy-ness you've got going on? Get rid of it. Roll up your blogrolls, roll up your archives, and clean that shit up. Most of the stuff you have on your sidebars is totally unecessary. For instance, the mental health emergencies stuff. Create a post for that on your blog, and then have a single link to it on your sidebar. Your categories (things that make me happy, things that piss me off) aren't user-intuitive and that pisses me off (and makes me unhappy). You just have way too much going on in those sidebars. It's god-awful. Want to see a perfect sidebar (from my perspective)? Go here. Hell, even the Canuckistani's sidebar is preferable to what you have going on, and I despise Canadians (in principle). (kidding, kidding)

My advice? You stop with the "do-it-yourself" template. Go to Gecko and Fly or freeblogtemplates or blogger templates and pick out something clean and neat and unbusy, and then don't mess with it. Just focus on your writing, and stop trying to do your own web designing.

There are plenty of decent free blog templates out there...if you don't like any of the ones on the sites I've linked to, just google "free blogger templates"...there are about a gazillion free/shareware blog templates online these days that you can pick from. Any one of them would be better than what you have going on here. Sheesh, your template made me long for a boring standard blogger template, even the ugly pepto bismal one.

The content:
Eh. Not great, not bad. Not really my cuppa, but I'm sure it appeals to some. The only advice I have here for Ariadne is...STOP BLOGGING ABOUT WORK. You are seriously jeopardizing your personal employment, asking for a lawsuit and may end up getting dooced. Not good. For your own benefit, Ariadne, I beg you: NEVER blog about personnel issues online. It could have serious ramifications for you, and it scared me (on your behalf) to read those posts. Please, take a lesson from other bloggers who have been fired for blogging about work, and don't.

Okay, I think your ass-reaming is at an end.

I give it for the worst template I've ever seen.

And for the content.

Truthfully, your mom's little line drawing saved your ass, Ariadne.

XOXO,

Love Bites

*I'll happily ship a pound of halloween candy to the reader who can guess the name of the song and the band from the title of this post. ;)