Last week I stumbled across Bloggy Opinions a blog review website. It seemed fairly entertaining, and the reviewers seemed to do a good even job of reviewing the sites they visited, so I went ahead and submitted ‘The Long Letter’ to them.
I got my review back today — and whaddaya know, not only was it good, it was really good! The review is posted on their site, but as there currently seems to be a slight HTML glitch that’s rendering my review invisible, I’m taking the liberty of copying it here.
DJWUDI — The Long Letter
Now here’s a blog I loved. It was excellent! It’s filled with multiple daily entries to keep you entertained, as well as a plethora of archived entries, features, and links that kept this reviewer busy for many hours. It generally amusing too, and though I’m sure a lot of work goes into the site, it appears effortless.
It’s the little things that make this site a gem in the drudge that can be the Internet. In the top right of your screen is an embedded applet that displays the mp3 that the author is currently listening too. It gets updated in real time and is the coolest thing I’ve even seen on a personal website! Unfortunately the version he uses is for the Macintosh operating system, so I won’t get to test it out on my blog. Another interesting feature is that he has implemented a help box on some of the more technical terms. Move your mouse over ‘Mbps’ and up pops a box displaying the full name ‘Megabytes per second’.
The layout is minimalistically beautiful. You’re not bombarded with a messy design; he takes a more newspaper, monochrome type layout. The text is the right size to read, and the font is easy on the eyes.
I can’t say enough about this blog. The author definitely deserves kudos. The only complaint I have is that he doesn’t seem to get that many readers, so the comment section is mostly empty.
Many thanks for such a glowing review!
And now, some quick comments in response…
Technically, the .mp3 listing provided by Kung-Tunes isn’t really an applet at all. Part of my efforts to make this site as accessible as possible across the widest range of browsers and connection speeds possible (since not everyone has a high-bandwidth connection) is to use pure HTML as often as possible, and using Java or JavaScript only when necessary. Briefly, the listing is just a second page embedded using an iframe tag — if you’d like the full technical details, I posted a Kung-Tunes integration tutorial when I got it all figured out.
Also, while it’s true that Kung-Tunes is Mac-only (nyeah-nyeah!), there’s a similar program available for PC users called BlogAmp (and, to be honest, I kind of wish that Kung-Tunes had the ‘history’ feature that BlogAmp does, where in addition to displaying the currently playing song, it also displays a list of the last few songs played).
The ‘help text’ that appears over the acronyms and terms I use is also a simple HTML tag — specifically, the acronym tag. For example, to produce WYSIWYG, I code it like this: <acronym title="What You See Is What You Get">WYSIWYG</acronym>. The dashed underscore and questionmark cursor that give the visual clue that more information is available are created by putting the following code in my CSS page:
acronym { border-bottom: 1px dotted black; cursor: help; }
The layout — which I’m quite glad works well, I’ve been staring at it for so long that sometimes it’s difficult for me to be objective about it — is due primarily to the fact that, to be brutally honest, I suck as a graphic artist! However, I’ve done the best I can to work around that and come up with a layout that’s functional and not too visually offputting, given that it’s entirely graphic-free.
Anyway, thanks again for such a good review! And, of course, should there be any other questions, feel free to ask, I’m always up to sharing what I’ve figured out over the years.