I wasn’t working on that the whole time, obviously (not even I am that slow), but it took me longer than expected to iron out the bugs. There are still some issues with IE6, which I might get around to fixing soon – or maybe not, I don’t know. IE6 is just generally so annoying that I don’t know if I can be bothered with it here on my private little site.

Anyway, if you’re reading this in your RSS reader, come on over to the blog for a sec and tell me what you think. Let me know if there is any weirdness in any browser (you know, the kind of weirdness that doesn’t look like it was done on purpose…).

In other news: there might be a few changes around here contentwise – one of them being that there will be more content again, hopefully. I’m not quite sure yet in which direction I’d like to take this blog, but I have some half-baked ideas I will try to get around to soon.

There have already been quite a few changes in my life recently, but I won’t go into that now. For now I am just happy the blog is up and running again, looking like I wanted it to. That must be enough for today.

But what with my mom being in hospital and me having to take over her job until the end of the week and running the household besides, I can’t get nothing done online right now. But I will update on the weekend, since I really can’t wait to play around with this new WordPress version.

How about you guys: have you updated already or are you waiting for the next security release? Any comments on the new dashboard? Any problems with plugins etc.?

BTW, I know I am owing a couple of you e-mails – and rest assured I will be getting to them soon. As soon as my mom is out of the friggin’ hospital, which should be by the end of the week.

Thanks to the NaNoWriMo-forum I have found a fantastic new site for mind-mapping. Not that I was looking for one, mind you. But so it goes.

And what was meant as a way of procrastination and delaying the inevitable (like writing my daily 2000 words) has instead helped me tremendously in actually finally getting a grip on where my story is going and organizing all those stray thoughts that were bumping around in my head into something resembling a plot.

Now, I don’t have much hope that this stuff I am writing will ever get to see the light of day in any form or shape, but I am convinced that bubbl.us is a site that will stay in my toolbox from now on.

I have never before had so much fun doing a mind-map. On paper they always tend to get too confusing for me after a while, because lots of things bunch up in one corner, whereas other parts are largely empty. Or I put so many lines through and around stuff that I can’t follow them anymore. All in all, paper mind-maps are just a huge waste of time for me.

So I didn’t really expect much from this online form of mind-mapping either, apart from killing a little time by playing around with these cute little bubbles. But, boy, was I wrong! Ok, it really is fun playing around with the bubbles, but it also actually works. Right from the start, without any lengthy explanations or anything. The use of the site is completely intuitive, I was up and going withing 2 minutes, even though there are lots of things you can do with it.

Not only can you easily make more bubbles, delete them (they very satisfyingly explode), move them around, delete the connections between them or connect them to others instead. Move the whole thing altogether just by clicking and dragging with your mouse. Zoom in or out just by scrolling. You can change the colors of the bubbles, hide the sidebar, export your finished mind-map as a picture or embed it in your website, you can save them, share them with friends, work on them together. And before you know it you have the whole outline for a complete project worked out.

Here is a complete overview of the current features, fittingly in the form of a mind-map.

It really is a fun and easy way to organize things and brainstorm creative solutions nagging pesky problems. (Like: where do I put the damn rats that keep wanting a bit part in my story? The answer to that would be chapter 6, but never mind.)

When I was organizing my bookmarks today I stumbled over the link to the website of Joe Vaux. He is an american graphic artist – according to his MySpace profile doing mainly animation, but what he displays on his own website are his paintings.

His art is definitely a bit on the disturbing side, but I like that. Also, there is always a lot going on in his pictures, so even if you look at them for quite a while you are still discovering new interesting details.

You really should go to his website to check out his pictures in a bigger version than I show here. This website, by the way, is one of the more inventive Flash-sites I have seen recently. I especially love the sound effects. And the pig, of course. But that’s just me, because I have a thing for pigs in general.

I am spending too much time reading all those 180+ posts every day in my RSS reader anyway (Honestly, why do some blogs think it is a good idea to churn out up to 5 posts a day?), so I have become pretty ruthless in trimming the list of blogs I am subscribed to. Sometimes one post can be all it takes to make me say good-bye for good.

This is one of those. Irritating beyond belief (no pun intended).

Which is a shame, because back when I subscribed to it I actually liked to read this blog. But that was back when it was still about stuff, not about this bullshit religion. Ah well, I’m sure the guy won’t miss one measly reader, and a proudly atheist one at that. After all, according to his (faulty) “logic” I must be dishonest and self-delusional, because even though I am not really a scientist I still do “believe confidently that believing in God is foolish” beyond hope.

My time is just too limited to waste it reading and getting worked up about obviously wrong stuff like this:

There is plenty of good scientific evidence to support belief in God.

*sigh* Religious people keep saying that over and over, but I have seen NOT ONE piece of evidence for this opinion. I guess, one reason for this is that those people just don’t know the proper definition of “scientific evidence”. (Hint: just because it is written in your book of fairytales isn’t enough to call it evidence).

Thanks to my recently renewed blog-reading addiction I have spent several hours each day surfing the net and hopping from blog to blog. And I have begun to notice some things that tend to annoy me each time I encounter them. Some of them are bad enough to make me leave the respective blog for good. Of course I am not telling anybody how to run their blogs. I am not trying to convince anybody to remove these features from their blog or saying they are necessarily all evil and to be avoided like the plague.

All I’m saying is that I noticed these things and didn’t like them. Now, this is of course only the opinion of one person. I might be completely wrong, so feel free to ignore me. Then again, I might have a point in some cases and if you are wondering why not more people read your blog, these things might have something to do with it, because maybe they annoy not only me. Who knows? I’m just sayin’ …

So, here is my Top 13 of the most annoying things I’ve found in blogs recently:

1. PayPerPost (no link this time, they’re not worth it)

I mentioned that one already in my last TT, so I won’t re-hash my problems with it again in detail. My opinion in short: It sucks. Big time.

2. CAPTCHA boxes to verify your comments

This is wide-spread among Blogger blogs, but I know of some others who use it as well. I know comment spam is a nuisance and this might work well to keep the spammers out. Unfortunately it annoys the hell out of your human commenters. Why?

Because a) Especially in Blogger I usually need at least 2 tries to get this thing to accept my comment. I don’t know why that is, maybe I have poor eye-sight and type in the wrong code, or maybe it just doesn’t like me. I don’t care. It just annoys me.

b) This is in regards to other sites where the CAPTCHA code hast to be entered on a separate page after sending off the comment. Usually I leave a site after I have commented (the ones I read regularly, that is, because there I usually comment on the latest post and there is no reason to stay there after sending off my comment) – I can’t say how many times I had already left the site before this CAPTCHA crap popped open, so I ended up having to re-type and re-send my comment. Annoying.

There are better ways to combat comment spam. Get yourself a WordPress blog and activate the Akismet plugin and all that dancing around is not necessary anymore (I just saw on Lorelle’s blog that Akismet is available for many other platforms as well.). And I’m sure, there are also ways with Blogger blogs and other blogging platforms to avoid this stuff.

3. Websites with 2 or even 3 sidebars

I understand that some people want to cram as much information as possible into their sidebars, and so one often isn’t enough anymore and they end up using two. (Three is just nuts, and not worthy of any comment.) Now I don’t wanna add any more to the eternal debate about 2-column vs. 3-column blog designs. There are actually some designs that look quite good with 3 columns. Also, the annoyance factor mainly depends on what exactly you fill these sidebars with.

You see, the thing is: all the stuff in the sidebars distracts your readers from your main content, especially if it’s loud and colorful. Plus, and that’s the real irony here: often it is neither really interesting in the first place, nor in any way helpful for them to find their way around your page. Which leads me to:

4. Cluttered sidebars in general

Even if you only got one sidebar, it is not really a good idea to clutter it up with all kinds of gadgets and badges and stuff, that is generally of no particular interest for anybody except yourself.

What do I, as an average reader, look for in a sidebar of a blog? Well, there’s the categories, or maybe a tag cloud instead, a link to the archives could be interesting, and a blogroll (hopefully one with not much more than 200 links, see #5). These are the essentials. Everything else are already extras.

Of course I am not saying you should add nothing else to your sidebar (I’m not trying tell you what to goddamn do here in any case) – after all I have a couple other things in mine as well. I’m just saying, don’t overdo it. Does anybody really need to know what the weather is like in your place, or what your avatar looks like (that’s more something for your about-page, I’d say), or in exactly how many communities you are involved, or how many web movements or memes you joined? Or whatever else people clutter up their sidebars with. I think not.

5. Out-of-date Blogrolls and other link lists

We all are interested, when we read a blog regularly, to check out the links in the blog’s link section, or blogroll, or whatever that section is usually called, right? Why is that? Because we think, however wrongly, that this is a list of links the blog owner likes and therefore recommends. And if we like his blog, we might also like the other sites he obviously frequents regularly. Right? Wrong.
Because often, if you click through the whole list on somebody’s blog (yes, sometimes I actually do that), you will find loads of dead links, of blogs that were updated last in 2005, of addresses that don’t even exist anymore and lots of other unpleasant surprises. What that tells me is that the owner of such a list adds links without ever re-checking them to see if they still work. Lazy.
As a blog owner, how do you decide which links to add to this section? Do you just link indiscriminately to every page or blog that once sparked your interest, or whose owner commented on your blog? Or do you really want me to believe that you are keeping up with 200 different blogs? Yeah, right. Get a life.
I actually like checking out other people’s link lists, but it works much better if you keep them simple. And short. And if you want to keep a list of web resources, or any other kind of list that tends to get longer and longer and longer, just put it on an extra page. Don’t clutter up your sidebar with it.

6. No Home-button

This one should, thanks to ready-made and easily available, templates not be a very widspread problem anymore. But funnily, lots of Blogspot blogs still have it.
How often is it that you find a blog through a link on another page that points to an archive page? There you are then, reading that post, finding it interesting and wanting to check out the rest of the blog. Now, even if there is no extra button or link, in most websites a click on the blog title or on the header graphic will easily transport you back to the homepage.
But what if that doesn’t work? (As it doesn’t in many Blogspot blogs, and I’m not all too sure about normal Blogger blogs either.) And if you’re very unlucky, neither is there a link to the main archive page. So you manually delete the archive part of the address from the address line of your browser – in the hopes of getting back to the homepage and be able to navigate around from there. Of course, by that time I often already lost interest in the blog altogether.
Clumsy? Very. Annoying? You bet.

7. Obtrusive Ads

Ok, this is probably one of the most annoying things for me in any website, but especially in blogs. I understand about wanting to monetize your blog (if I think it usually works all too well is a wholly different question). The thing is, if you plaster the whole page with ads, it looks butt ugly. If it’s only the sidebar, I might be able to ignore it. But if there are ads above or even within the posts, or those floating things that open up over the whole page, it just pisses me off. I don’t want to scroll down half a page or have to close an ad-window before I even get to see your content. Also, flashing things or stuff that endlessly moves around make me run for the hills in under 5 seconds.
If you have noisy, flashy ads on your page, you better have killer content I find nowhere else on the web, because otherwise I just won’t bother trying to find my way through all the other crap on your page to try to read it.

8. Huge RSS buttons

This is something I have come across a few times now. Here, for instance, or here. The worst examples I didn’t even bookmark – because I didn’t know I would need them again as a bad example. [Oh, and just because somebody apparently had a problem with my opinion in this point, I'd like to add here that I don't in any way want to criticize the blogs I linked to up there. (One of them I have actually subscribed to quite a while ago.) I just needed examples and these were the first two I stumbled upon while writing this post.]

Yes, I know you want me to subscribe to your RSS feed. Yes, it is very nice of you to make that option easily findable.

But, fuck it, I am not blind. So stop shoving that bloody button in my face. The likeliness of me actually subscribing to your blog does definitely not increase with the size of the stupid button. Concentrate on writing interesting and engaging content for your blog, and I will find a way to subscribe to your feed even if you don’t supply a button at all.

9. Whole rows of social bookmarking icons under each post

And this is one of the less awful examples again! I don’t even know half the services listed here (and please don’t try to explain or recommend them to me – I am not interested).
Two words: traffic whore.
The stuff is bad enough in the sidebar. But some people add literally whole rows of them under each post, ostensibly to make it easier for you, the reader, to digg or stumble or otherwise submit this post to the appropriate social bookmarking site.
Like hell I will. Such stuff looks just desperate.

10. Preview anywhere

Do you know sites where everytime you move your cursor over a link a little window pops up that shows a preview of the target site? Which bloody idiot invented this awful, annoying, stupid crap? Please report to me so I can shoot you.

Not only doesn’t this useless little snapshot picture tell me anything of value about the particular site, it also usually pops up exactly over some text I want to read. And sometimes moving the cursor away isn’t enough to let it vanish again right away. Besides, usually you move the cursor right over the next fucking link.
Did I say PayPerPost was the most annoying thing? I was lying, this shit is right up there with it.

11. Dark Background

Again, this is highly subjective, but I just hate websites with light text on dark backgrounds. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
In my opinion dark background makes the text much harder to read, no matter how good the contrast is. Even with white text on black background I feel my eyes grow tired very quickly. Especially if you, like me, read blogs for hours at a time, it can become quite an annoyance. There is a reason, folks, why black text on white background became the default for every book and paper ever printed – and it’s not just because they were short on black ink, ya know?
Also, I just don’t think it looks nice, but that is just me again…

12. Auto-Play Music

Thank god, it doesn’t seem to be “in” anymore to embed background music on websites, but some poor souls are still left who think it’s funny. On MySpace, of course, it is just the done thing. But that’S just one more reason why MySpace sucks.

It’s all very nice if you want to entertain your readers with your favorite song. Problem is, I don’t usually share your taste in music. Besides, I usually already listen to my own music when I am working on my computer. Also, when I read blogs I have between 10 and 20 different browser tabs open (I open every link in a new tab and finish reading the original site first). So, when suddenly my own music is mixed in with some other song I have to scramble around to find the respective tab, and then hopefully find a button somewhere to turn the song off. If I don’t find one, the site is history anyway, but even if I can turn the music off it still annoys me and I will likely not come back.

13. Dead blogs or ones that are only barely alive

By which I mean, of course, the frequency with which they are updated. It annoys me no end if I stumble upon a blog that has some great posts, but was last updated sometime 2005. Or if a new post gets written every 3 months or so. Or there are 15 posts in one week and then silence for 4 weeks, another 5 posts, then half a year hiatus and so on.

That’s just useless. If you, like me, have the blog just for fun, nobody asks you to post 5 long articles every day. It’s fine if you don’t have much time and post only once or twice a week. But if you do, please try to be halfway consistent. It’s fine with me if I have to check on a blog only once every two weeks to find new posts. But if I have come back twice and there was nothing, you’re off my radar for good.

And if you tried blogging and found out it just wasn’t for you, or you don’t have time for it anymore, or you just don’t have anything to say: for god’s sake, delete your dead blog. It’s not that hard, really.

Another one of my pet peeves are repeated “I don’t know what to write about”-posts. We all have, at one time or another, posted one of them. Mine is not too long ago, actually. And, I guess, once in a while (according to Stephen Fry once in your life!) it is ok. But there are actually blogs out there that seem to consist of not much else than such posts. Little hint: if you can never think of anything to write about, writing may not be the best hobby for you, ya know? ^.^

Wired News: New Genome Map Shows We’re Way More Diverse Than We Thought (ok, that one is probably only interesting for myself)

Mango - learn languages online for free (I didn’t have time to sign up and try it yet, but it sounds like an interesting concept and I will definitely give it a try soon).

Access Flickr! plugin for Firefox – lets you access flickr from countries where it is banned.

Check for broken links with dead-links.com

Browsershots  - test your webdesign in different browsers (I tried it and somehow I never get a shot of all the browsers I requested, but that might only be me…).

Of course, none of them are really new – for all I know everybody else might have been using them for years. I just call them new because they are new to me and I am still not certain most of them have any big value for me personally.

1. RSS feed subscription buttons or links (like the one above my own header picture)

I know they have been around since forever (in terms of the internet probably since 1998 or so), but I never bothered with RSS feeds until just very recently. I always thought, if I like to read a blog I also want to visit it. I like blogs in part because of their design, which also implies that if I hate the design (especially if there are lots of ads) I will likely not come back very often, no matter how good you write. Well, all that is past now, thanks to RSS feeds. Because when I only read the feed I don’t see the blog’s design. I don’t see the ads. I only have to click through if I want to comment, and on many of the new blogs I read nowadays I don’t want to comment.

2. LibraryThing script showcasing random books from blog owners’ collection

This is one little gadget I obviously like, which is why I have it in my own sidebar. I use LibraryThing only to keep track of the last 200 books I have read and liked (although at the moment it also still lists some others of my collection, I will replace them over time), so after a few years it should show only my 200 all-time favorites. I also like to see this widget on other people’s sites, because I am always interested in finding new books to add to my already overwhelming Mount TBR.

3. MyBlogLog pictures of recent readers

This is one of those things I regard as totally useless. The one I show here was taken randomly from another blog, because obviously I don’t have such a thing. This is actually one of the nicer varieties of this widget. There are other, uglier, much bigger versions around. I was just too lazy to look for one right now.

The widget supposedly shows you your recent readers. But of course, it only shows you the ones who have an account at MyBlogLog themselves and have uploaded a picture. The others are either ignored or it shows this black silhouette, whatever.

But what good is that anyway? It’s just one more of those hundreds of social bookmarking sites, where you can join a community. A community doing what exactly, is what I’d like to know? What is it good for? Except cluttering up your sidebar? I just don’t see the appeal.

4. FeedBurner

So, Feedburner burns your feeds. Please don’t ask me, what exactly that means. But apparently it’s the cool thing to do nowadays with your feeds.

The really cool thing is that I can monitor the number of my subscribers (which, for this blog, is surprisingly in the double digits – I still can’t believe it). and, and this is the reason I signed up in the first place, you can offer your feed by email as well, so people who don’t use an RSS reader can read it, too.

Also, you get all kinds of stats, which I have to still play around with a bit to make sense of them. and if you’re proud to have lots of subscribers you can also put nice little thingies like this on your site: – this one is obviously not relating to my site. I will add something like this only if my subscriber count should ever break 100. In other words, probably never. ;o)

5. Google Analytics

I have so much more fun with that than I had with StatCounter. Firstly, because GA has just much more functions and tells you a lot more things about your visitors than the free version of SC does. Secondly, at least for my site, GA shows me more visitors. I don’t know why that is, but I choose to believe the statistics I like more, which is in this case GA’s. There’s even a plugin for WordPress, so that you don’t have to put the code into your template files by hand. I just love WP plugins.

6. StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us, or any other of the gazillion social bookmarking sites out there.

I don’t have an account with any of them, and considering how much time I am wasting with reading blogs already, I am not sure I should sign up at all and risk finding even more good reads. Plus, I am not such a traffic whore that I would spend ages socializing and building a community and doing whatever just to get a few hundred more page impressions. Since I don’t monetize my blog, and I also have an offline life, it just isn’t worth the effort for me.

Besides, I am really not a community type of person. I have enough trouble to keep in touch with my real-life friends, so why should I join dozens of virtual communities? I would neglect them all in a matter of weeks anyway. That said, if I have a little more free time again, I might give StumbleUpon a try sometime. It’s always nice to find potential new favorite blogs.

7. BlogLines and Google Reader

Ever since I discovered RSS feeds I needed a reader as well. These two were the obvious choices to try. In the end I decided on Google Reader, mainly because I liked the interface better and I use Google all the time anyway, so I won’t need to remember yet another login and password.

8. Technorati tags and buttons

I am still not quite certain if I really need this (I mean, let’s be honest, I will never be one of the A-list bloggers, nor do I have the slightest inclination to even try, so why bother with Technorati at all?). I don’t even know yet how to interpret all the data Technorati can give me about my site. (What does this authority figure mean, for instance? Haven’t got a clue, but like to play around with it anyway.)

9. pay per post

Ok, this one is a thing I really really hate with a vengeance. In 95% of the cases reading the sentence “this is a sponsored post” or whatever it usually says, will not only make me disregard everything I read in this particular post, it will also in all probability make me leave this blog and never come back. I understand that many people want to make money with their blogs, and in an attempt to not plaster most of their site over with pesky ads that nobody ever clicks anyway, some people might think this is a good alternative.

Well, good luck, if you think it works for you. I read blogs, especially personal blogs (you know, the ones that are written just for fun and not mainly with profit in mind), because I am interested in the opinions and the outlook on life of the people who write them. If I see a sponsored post (especially if I notice this fact only after I have read to the end of the post) I just feel cheated. That’s not personal content in my eyes, that’s advertisement, pure and simple. If I know that you are paid to endorse a product, how can I trust what you have written? Because I don’t think people would usually write a bad thing about a product they’re reviewing. It’s just crap and one of the sure-fire ways to chase me away forever.

10. Donate to PayPal button

Now I think, this is a hilarious idea. I wonder how often people, even in well-frequented blogs, really use those buttons to donate money to the blog-owner. If you’re interested to try it out yourself, I found a step-by-step instruction here.

11. My still beloved ScribeFire plugin,

Which I use incessantly just like I predicted in this post. This little thing makes posting so much more hassle-free and easy. Aditionally it allows me to save stuff as notes. Those don’t get published to the blog, but are just saved in a list in the browser. I use these notes instead of my bookmarks nowadays to save interesting links, because in a note I can also add a sentence or two about why I found it interesting in the first place, and I can remember on which site I found it, so I can give credit. Often the note is half a blog post already, so later I only have to go back and revise it a little before I can post it. The best plugin I have.

12. The CoComment Firefox plugin

I have found that one just today. Apparently it tracks all the comments you leave on other people’s blog, and the ensuing conversations.

I can’t say yet how well it works, but I thought it was just a great idea, especially in regards to TT. Because I don’t know how it is with you, but I can never remember on which sites I left comments that I might check again later to see if the blog owner answered me. You know, sometimes you ask questions in a comment, or there is a nice discussion going on and you tell yourself “I have to come back here later to see how it developed”. But, of course, if you have visited 20 other blogs meanwhile, you will just not be able to find the one you’re looking for again, unless you’re looking through them all once more.

This plugin now is supposed to help you keep track of all your comments. I will test it in the next few days and report back at a later date with my opinion of it.

13. The iFollow and the iReply movements

Both are pretty much self-explanatory. iFollow means that I have a plugin that deactivates the no_follow attribute for links in the comments. So, if you leave a comment on my site, it is a proper backlink to your site, one that search engines (and probably Technorati as well) will actually “count”.

iReply is about interacting with your visitors. It basically is the commitment to, as much as possible, reply to comments, and to encourage discussion.

And both have got nice buttons you can put in your sidebar.

(this one even comes in several nice colors)

As you will undoubtedly have noticed, I have only one of them in my own sidebar. I do think, both of them are things worth encouraging. But for me, the iReply thing should be a thing one can take for granted at a blog. It is common courtesy to reply to comments, or at least acknowledge them. So, considering the fact that I want to keep my sidebar as clutter-free as possible, I abstain from adding this button, but I fully endorse the notion.

Ok, last week I made another list of beautiful guys, this week it’s finally the girls’ turn. Although I myself lean more toward menfolk, I have no problem acknowledging and admiring female beauty in all its variations. As with the men I need a bit more than just a pretty face, though. There are lots of undeniably pretty women out there, especially in showbiz, that I can’t find beautiful, because from what I know about them they seem boring, not overly intelligent and just plain free of any hint of a real personality. So, again my list is highly subjective. In compiling it I noticed just how much I like strong, assertive women. Or at least actresses who more often than not portray such women.

1. Angelina Jolie

13. Katherine Heigl

.

So, I’m curious: who did I forget – or leave out?