DyRE’s Guide to Minimising Exposure to Intellectually Deficient and/or Damaging Acts of Blog is quite the handy (and humerously verbose) guide to avoiding those certain blogs that tend to drain your brainpower. While this is an excellent primer for what to avoid in the dangerous wasteland of bad blogs, there are some things I’d like to add. They aren’t as foolproof as DyRE’s rules, but I think they are important to note. First is the “lack of emphasis” type of blog; a page with no links, no bold text, no italic text, and very few line breaks – just solid text. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this one, probably a lot, but its something that irks me. If you are familiar with the regular A-list blogs, you’ll note that there are many impish imitators who will do nothing but post links lifted off of MetaFilter, kottke, megnut, etc… I don’t know how these people expect to gain legions of loyal visitors when all they do is recycle links everyone has already seen!
Ok, enough complaining about bad weblogs. Its easy to complain without providing a possible solution. So how does one actually go about creating a smart, compelling, readable blog? Here are Ten Tips for Building a Bionic Weblog. Its probably the best advice anyone starting a weblog could read and I wish more blogs would contain the sort of qualities that article speaks of. If you were to read my archives, I think you could possibly pinpoint the first day in which I read that article (well, maybe not, I did have some relapses, but I think I’m doing ok – aren’t I?)