For The H*ll Of It. Why did I review this site? For the hell of it. Why should you read this site? For the hell of it. This was the idea I had going into this weblog.
I was presented with a nice 3 column layout that looked very clean. I was immediately impressed with the good use of colors and the fact that it looked good on my browser of choice, Safari. Glancing longer at the site I realized it was a mac.com url and it should look good in Safari. Then I read that the site doesn’t look good in IE, which is a bad thing since most readers use IE.
Onto the content. I was impressed with the diversity of the posts. Talking about software and personal stuff, and doing a good job with keeping me entertained for the first page. Yes I said first page.
The archives were not clearly labeled at all. There is a calendar which we all know I hate to use, then there is a standard browse by date, and finally a browse by category. Not bad having all of those options, it just is too bad that they were not all together.
So onto the archives I go, and I see that the site has posts dating back to 1998! This is insane. Of course there is a big time jump from that year to the next: the next set is 2001. Why not, lets see what was going on back in 1998. A click of the link and a messed up page. I thought maybe it was just for that year (since it was rather odd) so I tried 2001. Nope same problem. And the problem persisted through out all the archives by date links.
That leaves me with one choice: browse by category. Now some people find this option a nice touch. They can find specific posts quickly. Others, like me, do not like this because we cannot see any growth and that sort of thing overall. But I tried to go through all the posts by category and it just wasn’t the same. No sense of time, no sense of the past, just posts.
So just for the hell of it (pun intended), I decided to try and look at the page in IE and guess what, the site doesn’t load properly. No wonder so many reviewers complained about not being able to read the site.
Overall this site could have scored a much better score. But the archive problems, and the fact that the site doesn’t load for IE bring it down. Even though there are a fair number of posts with just code, I would think that the average person could enjoy this site. I hope the author decides to fix his layout so that he stops alienating readers just because he is on a mac. I am too, but I welcome any and all readers. For The H*ll Of It