Maybe There Should Be A Consequence?

Folks, here's the deal right now. Completely unrelated to my part-time gig here at AAYSR, this has been a brutal two weeks. Long-nights-and-red-flags brutal. I mean, people have fucking died, man.

So if I come across as a bit curt or abrupt, I mean, more so than usual, don't take it personally.

Not this time.

But it does mean that I just need to cut to the friggin' chase here, and tell you about my friend Roschelle, and her Inconsequential Logic. (Side note: What the hell is that supposed to mean anyway? Are we supposed to dismiss you out of hand, because you're Inconsequential? Or are you being ironic?) Roschelle has been blogging a long time. A looooooong time. Since 2004, if you believe her.

Which you kind of have to. Because there's no way to get back all the way to the beginning to see when she began and what she sounded like way back then. Because she has no archive navigation at all. Other than this little roulette wheel type thingy where you click it and it serves up a random post. First couple days I was reviewing what she had to say, I thought that was kind of fun. But that fun wore off.

And I still couldn't get to the beginning.

As a reviewer, very little chaps my ass more than making getting the big picture a damn puzzle.

I pulled it up in Google Reader. Which took me back to October 11, 2009. In which I learned about splogs. Which I already knew about, I just didn't know they had a name. She then spends a lot of time blogging about blogging and social media. Not so much about content as much as about mechanics. In short, she came off sounding a bit like the back section of Reader's Digest, where they give you little bite sized tid-bits, but not full on articles.

And sure, that's probably someone's cup of treacle. Just not mine.

So, yeah, I skipped ahead, back to the present day. Luckily at some point along the way, she stopped writing exclusively about blogging and started writing about other stuff, but it still seemed like for every post that was what I'm in this whole blogging thing for, there were ten that were genuinely, to me, inconsequential, to use her own word.

Roschelle is pleasant enough. Does, generally, nothing particularly wrong. But I was not engaged. I was not especially amused. It wasn't a chore to read her writing, but it wasn't enrapturing either. I sort of felt like I was being held at arms length, away from the more challenging subject matter, the more humanizing material. And I'd say that's the one thing I'd suggest to Roschelle about her content -- bring more of herself to it.

I mean, seriously, she wrote an entire post about Father's day, doing a twist on it and stuff, without telling me anything about her, her mom, or her dad.

Unless that's not what she's in it for. All the clutter and gadgetry in her template does lead me to believe that she may be in it for the click-throughs and follows and all of that shit. But if she is trying to engage readers more, she should work on that opening up thing a bit more.

Oh, yeah, and about that template? Normally, I'm the guy who doesn't pay attention to that. As long as I can read the text and can find the navigation, I don't care what your template looks like. But right now, all the doodads and hoohahs all over this thing make it look like a teenage girl's bedroom. In cases like this, Roschelle, less is very much more.

All told, this whole thing adds up to this... One large, full-fledged "MEH."



I think you have it in you to get a star or two, but as the Smiths say, you just haven't earned it yet, baby.