Peevish Blogger Blogging Peeves

My friend calls it the New Year Slump™. It’s what happens after you’ve had too much fun that, when holiday ends, you start to get the blues as your life descends to normal - also known as, unremarkable. That’s essentially my life-since-2008, summarized.

Something like that always puts me in a bad mood, to an extent more so than when I’ve been unlucky. At least when predicaments happen, I can easily write about them, throw in some funny/angsty punchlines, learn a few lessons, and receive words of kindness from supportive commentators (eyeing Schumey - yay!). But when life’s a bore, how could I write about it without in the process getting bored too? Picture a bored writer writing boringly about how boring his boring life has bored to bore him boringly about boredom. It’s like you dreaming of yourself asleep while dreaming of yourself asleep while dreaming… All right, save yourself from the migraine. Don’t even visualize it.

Times when you’re bored, de-stress by directing your thoughts to a hate (hehe I’d make a fabulous psychiatrist). Law of Attraction practitioners would tell me "shouldn’t you be reading The Secret instead to learn its lessons"? Why, that certainly isn’t very productive. You’re going to see me getting pissed off about reading a book that wants me to be foolishly happy. Things that try to please but achieve the contrary rile me up the most. Plus I’d be angry about spending money on an overprized toilet-paper. That’s more anger than I could manage. Wait, why am I talking about The Secret? Did anyone just blog about it?

So the hate I’m going to tell you about is my blog-related pet peeves. If you’ve been into blogging yourself, chances are you know of the habits of several bloggers. I find some of these habits downright loathsome, and I won’t be surprised if others feel the same. So I hope that in this post I’ll be able to express what, perhaps, others may feel but have never said aloud. I will also offer suggestions for those who find themselves guilty of said habits but have the sense to change for the better.

And I will not list spamming as a pet peeve. Duh, everyone hates spams! Even spammers hate spams. That’s not pet peeve at all. That’s universal peeve.

Anyway, we shall begin.

“Blog Hopping”

They are strangers-to-you showing that they have visited you by writing a “blog hop” on your tagboard. Sometimes they’ll write a one-size-fits-all praise such as “nice blog” or “cool blog”. They may even request to exchange links with you (this one is the least annoying because at least the honesty is there).

You may think that these people are validating you in their little ways, but that’s not true. They only want readers, and in their desperate search for those, they establish their presence everywhere they go by posting in as many tagboards as they can, hoping to lure the authors of the blog they visit to their own chasm. Attention is all they want, really. They don’t care for your well-being at all – ask these blog-hoppers if they’ve read your blog and see if you can get a candid yes. They’re just cold and impersonal clicks-happy dimbulbs who orgasm in every increment of their Page Ranks.

Of course every blogger wants to get as many readers as they can, but I do believe in a less rude way of inviting readers. That is, if you want to be noticed by me, the way you can do it without veins protruding on my forehead is to read my blog and post a RELEVANT comment! Make me think that you’re capable of stringing two words together and that you’re not a keyboard-slapping moron. Think my blog is too long? Fine, go find someone else’s!

Look, if you want your link in as many blogs as you want, the only way to do it is to WRITE SKILLFULLY! Can’t do that? Don’t blog! Think you aren’t good enough? Get an Elements of Style and go read some books! If you write anywhere like Caffeine Sparks or Liz or Schumey or Brad Gallaway or Brackenbeard or Wits or Fence or Cai or Virus or… gee, everyone from that Dope Blog list of mine! If you write anywhere like them I’d be the first one to add you! I’ll even ask you to autograph my chest. I’ll even be cordial enough to post on your tagboard, saying, “I’m going to add you”, without any intent of asking you to do the same but only of letting you know you’ve a fan, And if you like my blog, I’ll be happy too. That’s link-exchanging, the refined way.

The ones who link exchange the “amateur” way should consider river-hopping too. As for Raul Gonzales, he should jump into a cistern of boiling mercury - his own spit, incidentally.

Link Flooding

Imagine if you have to read a Crime and Punishment that has a word in different color per phrase:

He ran beside the mare, ran in front of her, saw her being whipped across the eyes, right in the eyes! He was crying, he felt choking, his tears were streaming. One of the men gave him a cut with the whip across the face, he did not feel it. Wringing his hands and screaming, he rushed up to the grey-headed old man with the grey beard, who was shaking his head in disapproval. One woman seized him by the hand and would have taken him away, but he toreher and ran back to the mare. She was almost at the last gasp, but began kicking once more. himself from

Can you imagine going over a hundred pages of that?

Yet for some bizarre reasons, some bloggers like to overwhelm their posts with links. They probably do it to appear…er… well-read? Well-clicked?

I mean, geez, what, are they trying to emulate Wikipedia? There’s a reason why wikipedia’s called “an encyclopedia”. You go there for reference! You don’t go to most blogs for the same reason.

I saw the most severe case of link flooding while reading someone’s travels. Imagine that. It’s not even a case study, so I don’t know what it’s trying to be. Maybe, an “obscure” diary that requires stupendous “supplementary” reads?

You’re better off writing in a way that requires the fewest side-reads. If you’re talking about something that requires a lot of sources, just put the links at the bottom, just like in prints.

Page Rank Moaning

People who moan about page ranks, they’re like Britney Spears, except, with panties on.

I’ve heard of the importance of Page Rank for business sites and for pro-bloggers blah-de-blahs. That’s fine with me. I do, however, take issues with bloggers who keep moaning about page ranks. They go to tagboards outright asking others to increase their traffic, and they incessantly write blog posts about wanting to increase their page ranks. Really, sometimes I just CTRL+F, search for “page rank”, and when there are results I turn off the window immediately. Haha.

Here’s a simple truth in life: we hate whiners (and by whiners I mean those who groan aloud but do not offer solutions).

Just think of it this way, do you like to constantly visit a kid who always bug you to buy him an Optimus Prime because his dad wouldn’t?

If you find yourself constantly moaning about page ranks, I give you the cardinal rule of blogging: write better.