and then it came to me in a vision

Last night, I was reading blogs linked off of Blogger's list of ten most recently published blogs. I don't read every blog listed before I refresh the page to get a new list of ten journals. I can usually flip through several blogs before I get to one I will even read. As I was doing this last night, I asked myself, What makes a worthy blog?

First, the name must hook me. The title of the site is what is listed on the Fresh Blogs list. If the name of the journal is My Life or Bobby's Blog, I'm not likely to click. Now if the name is something like Through These Eyes or Barrel of Monkeys, the bloggers will probably elicit a visit from me. And I admit, sometimes I visit a blog with the mundane names, but I will not go to one that looks like this: ~*_tori's journal_*~. What is all that mess?

Once I arrive, it's about the layout. One of the things I look for in a blogger is creativity. Therefore, when I recognize the template as one of the ones provided by Blogger, points are lost. This doesn't necessarily take the author out of the running though. Sometimes I arrive upon the first publication of that blog, and they just haven't had the time to get a new template. However, not any template suits me either. I have a hard time dealing with blogs with celebrity themes. Can I really trust an author whose background is a scene from Lord of the Rings. (Note: I'm not hating on LOTR. I like the movies, but is the trilogy all there is to this person?) C'mon. Personalize! And this doesn't mean it has to be corner to corner bells and whistles. Honestly, I would prefer a standard issue Blogger template to something like that. Simple is good. Less is more.

Because it's all in the content. I don't demand perfect grammar. Hello, I don't use it myself. I do, however, expect correct spelling. I like punctuation. I can guarantee you that I'll hit the back button before you can say "goodgarner" if I see something like this: "2nite wuz good me larry n danielle went too the movie............i couldnt beleive how it ended this morning i seen the pre-veiw on tv but anywayz........tommarow nite were gonna CaMp OuT!!!!" Ladies and gentlemen, that type of writing is out there. And I'm not reading it. But not every intelligent person acquires my readership. I don't care to read political commentary. I also look to see if this person maintains the blog. If this is the first post in ages and the post before that is dated long before that, I probably won't come back. It's waste of my time. It's not all in the quanity either. Quality matters. If someone has posted seventeen times that day with one-liners, I'm not impressed.

Yeah, so I'm not quite sure why I just spent all that time explaining what makes a blog worthy of my readership. I guess I find it interesting that I definitely judge the book by its cover, but its what's on the inside that counts. So I suppose I'm shallow. You may have the best blog content in the world, but if the name sucks and the layout doesn't suit my fancy, I'll never know.