Blogger Sentenced to Life in Cleveland

Okay, so enough self-horn tooting. Let's get back to my bread and butter, which is the mordacious destruction of fellow webmasters' pride, dreams, and love of life in an attempt to help them better their sites and themselves. The fangs have been re-cut. Onward, ho!

Hot Coffee Girl, brewer of, surprise surprise, hotcoffeegirl.squarespace.com, writes:

I like your site! I am also a web designer/developer...and I am going to crawl back through your archives to check it all out. There is always a lot of information out there, and your site is a good resource for people to go. I imagine I will end up blogrolling you...I keep my roll at 15 or less, but I just kicked someone off so I have been looking for an addition.
Feel free to review my site.

And feel free I will, as is my right guaranteed to me by the laws governing the land I pay tens of...millions of dollars in taxes to each day to protect my well-being, wealthify the unambitious, change my streetlamp lightbulbs, and buy really, really expensive toilet seats. Oh, and give me rights and stuff. And if you look up wealthify, it's like, number three on the list of words to be added to Webster's, right under "to ride dirty" and right before "joladb", which is a mystical Innuit creature who was able to ferment snow into Eskimo beer, otherwise known as "Eskibeer". According to legend, it was the first beer ever discovered, ironically explaining the correlation between Molson's and urine. Hmm...

Oh, damn, I forgot. I'm doing a site review. Well, HCG, I must say that I pity you, but I respect you. Putting up with life in Cleveland, Ohio is by far one of the most cruel punishments that a judge could have given you for that time you took a shovel to that litter of puppies and baby giraffes gamboling with the butterflies and rainbows in the buttercup field. Man, when I read about that, I nearly cried. But living in Cleveland, while cruel, serves you right. I've always wondered if when the children who are forced to grow up there draw pictures of their families, do they include a sun? I was just curious because I doubt they even know what the word "sun" means, unless it's in the form of, "Son, go git me a berrr." But, as always, I digress.

I think part of the reason I enjoy your blog so much is not the simple, straight-forward design, since design is like very thin icing on a huge, delicious ice cream cake, but because your writing is stellar. You tell a good story and you can spell — two very important things when considering whether or not I read someone's blog. Occasionally I will even chortle whilst reading posts about you getting stuck in the snow and freaking out, or on how much you hate something or someone, or about making sexy time with a Boy (or with yourself?). I think what's really impressed me the most, though, about this blog, all BS aside, is how complete it is in terms of features. You have everything from good writing to galleries full of self-proclaimed bad paintings (why you have a gallery of them, I don't know, possibly for comedic value, but it's a gallery nonetheless) to video interviews of you, and we're not talking YouTube amateur porn. I mean, the guy had a microphone, and not the kind where he introduces himself by saying, "Hey, baby, you wanna, uh, talk to my microphone?" but the real kind that transmits sound. Granted, I don't know how much is actually cookie-cutter squarespace templating and how much is HCG Inc., but regardless, it offers a lot of entertainment to the would-be reader. Also, the theming of the design? Loves it. The big thing going around the internet (or so I've heard) is that "Fix My Site Month" is quickly overtaking "Christmas" as the popular theme for December (strangely, in offline arenas as well, like I totally saw this car dealership decked out in grey and orange with pictures of my snooty man pasted on all the windshields. It was classy). I suggest you follow suit (I did).

As for what you could do to seriously improve your site, I mean, sure, you can always improve a design and you can always clean up sidebars, but I think that for blogging, design should always come second to content. It doesn't matter if your blog looks like the sum of an elephant and three gallons of Super Colon Blow (figuratively, of course. I wouldn't want to stare at that while trying to read) as long as your content is engaging in some way, be it through interest, humor, or utter disgust and depravation. Sure, you may turn some readers away by a page covered in pachydermal fecal matter, but you don't want them anyways, the closed-minded maggot pies. But, of course, your page is not feces-smeared, so you have far less to worry about.

My advice? Keep on writin. Nobody likes a blogger who stops writing for a month-and-a-half at a time. Oh.

Okay, back to self-tooting. For you cryers and haters out there moaning, "Oh, all he does is tout his own stuff," I suggest that you recall whose site this is, and then take some of the aforementioned Super Colon Blow and go drive on an Alabama highway at night. Anyways, I've just "finished" (and by "finished", I mean "pushed live") my personal site, www.jasonedelman.com which at the moment contains pretty much nothing but an imported version of this blog and a little bit about myself, but will eventually include a portfolio of work I've done and a handy-dandy little section where I aggregate all the articles I've bookmarked that have been influential in my development as a, um, developer. So check it out, bookmark it, cry and paw at the screen while you look at it because it is so beautiful, do whatever, and go ahead and send me a message through my little contact form. I'm thinking of also putting my review queue up there somewhere so you know exactly where you stand in line and that I'm not full of crap when I tell you that there are 132895127 people in front of you. It could happen.