#StandWithUkraine
Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko —  — WordPress — blog, critique, css, design, nice2all, tweak

Acting on blog critique 2

Original acting on blog critique post unexpectedly for me got ton of positive and helpful comments. Got me even more convinced that showing appreciation for feedback is most important step to promote it.

Some time ago Lyndi of Nice2All reviewed my blog and among other things noted few that could be improved fixed.

Missing 404 page

I was aware (for months) that theme I am using had no template for 404 page (shown to visitors on invalid URLs). That wasn’t a priority (I check all links from time to time) but something that still needed fix sooner or later.

And so I opened

Armed with (too much) knowledge I made simple template with few links. It felt empty so I found, cleaned up and added a picture to fill white space.

404_screenshot

404_screenshot

Check out final result https://www.rarst.net/404

CSS not validating

By the time I got to it – it was already validating. Classical fix by postponing. It still shows plenty of “same foreground/background color” warnings but from my experience that can easily require rewriting entire CSS from scratch and doesn’t influence anything.

Usage of inline CSS

In perfect world all CSS resides in separate files and doesn’t invade upon beautiful semantic markup. My blog is far from perfect and I have two big reasons for not fixing this:

  1. I tweak things a lot. Creating CSS classes and ids for every little thing means forgetting to clean them up and making situation much worse than it is.
  2. Plenty of plugins produce code with inline styling. Very hard to get rid of – editing code for each plugin is no fun and must be repeated each time it gets updated by developer.

I disagree on this one. I had seen no recommendations claiming title attribute is mandatory. It is beneficial on short links but I don’t think that providing every single link with that is something worth spending time on.

Tag cloud

Yet again I am torn on this one. It sure doesn’t look like something awesome. Still it’s one of the very few elements that allow to quickly grasp what blog is about – something that I consider very important. More than willing to hear ideas for this and until I get custom design update tag cloud stays.

Have something to say about my blog design or content? I will be very happy to hear that – no matter positive or negative things.

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2 Comments

  • Lyndi #

    I like the new 404 page. With regards to the title attributes. I did say this is not something that is compulsory. The 'title' is the bit that is spoken in readers used by the visually impaired. It also provides the tool tip (in the browsers that get it right). This is a very personal call. It should be noted that simply repeating the text of a link in the title adds no value. It should only be used if there is additional information that needs to be shown regarding the link. The same with the inline CSS added by plugins. This is a personal choice. For me it is easy. If a plugin forces this on me and I cannot fix it, I find another plugin.

  • Rarst #

    @Lyndi Sure it's not really right/wrong choices. :) Just clarifying where I stand on those.