Since you didn’t request “hard or soft” review, here are some things that you might want to know in general.
Validate your site as there are errors and the site doesn’t meet XHTML standards. A pretty site has “pretty code” but more importantly, good coding prevents a lot of site uglies on different browsers.
The site is clean and simple, but the sidebar is certainly stuffed with a lot of information. Over time you will probably find some of that information to not be as “useful” or “pretty” and you may clean up and condense some of it so the sidebar reflects the clean overall look of the rest of the site.
The use of the related entries plugin on your single posts between the comments and the post is a nice effect, removing them from the sidebar, where many people put them.
You are not alone in my number one complaint against the use of too small of basefonts. I had to knock it up a notch to be able to read it without strain. A lot of people are starting to use high resolution monitors which makes small type look smaller, so you might want to consider increasing the side a little.
Overall, it’s nice. Clean up the errors and it will be “nicer”.
Not so much a design critique as a content one — I have a rather difficult time deciphering which content is original to your blog and which you are pulling in from elsewhere. It’s particularly confusing when content without attribution contains the first-person, making it appear, in context, that you are the author.
See, for example, your WordPress Plugins page, in which you directly copy the the text of the miniblog plugin description from nmyworld, making it seem that you are responsible for the plugin. Bit problematic, since the author’s CC License requires attribution, and you are definitely repurposing content.
Or here, where you duplicate a recent story from DigiTimes without attribution. Again, the reader is left to assume that you are the author, and is denied meta information about the actual author, which goes to credibility (DigiTimes has produced a number of erroneous tech-rumors in the past; knowing that they are the source is key, in this case, to deciding how much credence to give the story).
I’m not a journalist, so I can’t advise you on the standard practices which should be followed. I am a consumer of the written word, however, and would expect to see any borrowed copy appear in quotes, or in a blockquote, or merely preceded by some formula to the effect of “From today’s DigiTimes: ” or “nmyworld says:” This eliminates confusion, makes it clear that your motives are not suspect, and allows your readers to further investigate the source(s) of the article on their own, if they wish to do so.
Thread Starter
fro
(@fro)
Yes I usually do put from blahblahblah, but I must of miss that one article. If you look through most of the other articles I have done that. I do agree with you on the plugins page. I do need to specify that these are not my plugins, but that I am giving respect to the authors for being my favorite ones. I’m sorry I missed that article, but I will try to go through all of them and see if I missed any.
