dive into mark

Vincent Flanders: Two Blog Tools That Don’t Suck. There are two blog tools that don’t suck — Blogger and Radio Userland. Why don’t they suck? Simple. I, Vincent Flanders, can install and run them without involving their technical support department. For Vincent’s purposes, I completely agree with him; he needs a product like Radio that is easy to setup.

However, since Vincent has made a career of skewering web sites, I feel justified in pointing out a few things about his:

1. Your weblog has no visible archives. Radio creates them automatically; why don’t you link to them?
2. Your weblog has no visible permanent links to individual entries. Radio creates them automatically; why did you take them out of your template? To find the link above, I relied on my enormous geek knowledge of Radio’s standard URL scheme (to guess the URL) and of HTML hand coding (to find the anchor tag). Weblogs are meant to be linked to; without permanent links, we can’t do that.
3. Your weblog is inaccessible in many ways. For instance:
   • It uses hard-coded font sizes, making it harder for users with visual disabilities to resize and read the text. Your stylesheet should use percentages instead.
   • It uses a complex nested table-based layout which doesn’t linearize well (screen reader software will read your entire navigation bar on each page before reading the content). The least you could do is add an invisible “skip navigation” link to skip to the page’s main content. CNN.com does this, for example.

These are not fatal flaws; there are some easy things you could do to improve the usability of your weblog (mostly centered around figuring out how to use your new blogging tool correctly). The accessibility issues are only slightly more difficult. However, you will have to do it yourself, since none of Radio’s templates are accessible, and you seem proud of the fact that you don’t know enough to fix your template yourself, so I’m not optimistic. This is one of the things that $150 would buy you; MovableType’s default templates are much more accessible. (They would also make your pages load faster, a pleasant byproduct.)

Bottom line: choosing a good blogging tool is not enough; you’ve done nothing to compensate for its shortcomings, and you seem to have gone out of your way to subvert its strengths. For a guy who makes money off a site called “Web Pages That Suck”, your weblog sucks.

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