1. You have a sidebar filled with widgets and gizmos and gadgets, all of which make your page take an eternity to load and clutter your blog.
2. You use Blogspot and one of the default themes, making your blog look like every other crappy blog I’ve ever stumbled across.
3. You don’t know how to spell or use grammar. You don’t even use capital letters at the beginning of sentences.
4. You spent 10 minutes on Photoshop and came up with one of the ugliest header logos to have ever graced the Internet.
5. There’s no contact information anywhere to be found. You don’t even have an “about” page that tells me who you are.
6. You spent several thousand dollars to buy your blog from a respected blogger only to turn it into a hunk of junk. Step up Marc from One Man’s Goal and Max from Blogging Experiment, who, I should add, deletes comments now.
7. You admit that you have no idea what you’re talking about, which leaves the rest of us wondering why you are blogging at all. Prime example: you chose the MMO niche and every month you think it’s a good idea to release an income report telling us that you don’t make any money online.
8. You use the word “guys” all the time to refer to your readers, as if we’re all one big, happy group of friends.
9. You write about bullshit like the “dot com lifestyle” and how you’re either living it or you’re hoping to live it some day because John Chow has convinced you that the only way to be successful in this world is to be like him. Heck, it’s time to ditch all of your friends and surround yourself with successful people.
10. You have a checkbox on your comments that automatically opts me in for emails whenever someone else comments on your lame post. I then end up getting emails about posts months after I’ve commented on them. Similarly, you have an auto-generated email sent out to me thanking me for commenting on your blog. Jerk.

There are, of course, more than 10 reasons why I hate your blog. Feel free to suggest more.

Tags: Blogger rant by Angel
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I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to keep this blog updated. It’s ironic because at this time of year (Christmas and New Year), people are supposed to have extended amounts of free time. For me, as a foreigner working for a newspaper in Thailand, it’s been the complete opposite.

Those of you who work from home will be horrified to learn that, yes, I worked all day Christmas Day in my office. I will also be at work the morning of New Year’s Eve and the afternoon of New Year’s Day. Am I to expect double time? Triple time? Nope. I am not being paid anything other than my usual salary and I’m working my fingers to the bone.

I enjoy my job thoroughly, but am giving some serious thought to the idea of taking some time off once my contract runs out. I sincerely doubt I will ever go through with working from home entirely, but the temptation is there.

What’s most important for me at this stage in my life is that I enjoy what I am doing, both in and out of work. For this reason alone, I have cut back on a lot of my freelance and part-time work. I’ve been turning down or passing over paid gigs because when I hit 25 last month, I realized that all I did was work.

Since I cut back on my workload, things have been great. I have more time for my girlfriend, for promoting parties, DJing and just enjoying the time I have. I could stay at home all the time and work myself to death. Sure, I’d make tons of money, but I’d miss out on so much more.

However, with age comes responsibility. I am taking the first steps to buying a house. If I have a mortgage, things will have to change and I will have to focus on work a little more.

I feel like I’m at a crossroads at the moment. Have you ever found yourself in this situation, caught between adulthood and childhood, responsibility and freedom?

Tags: Blogger rant by Angel
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I don’t like being opted into anything – be it mailing lists, updates, newsletters, promotional offers – without being explicitly told beforehand. If I want to sign up for something then it should be through my own actions. Receiving an email the first time you leave a comment on a blog is a minor annoyance, but I draw the line at being signed up for the comments on a post automatically.

It happens on about half of the blogs I leave comments on. It doesn’t happen on all of them, so I rarely look to see if there check-box is selected that would subscribe me to the entry. Please, bloggers, set your comments up so that people only subscribe to an entry through their own actions. It’s annoying to log into your email account and find dozens of emails, one each for the latest comment left in an entry you ended up signed up for.

Sometimes I want to receive updates by email, but those are the times when I will check the box myself. Otherwise, it’s as good as spamming your readers, especially on posts that attract a lot of comments.

Tags: Blogger rant by Angel
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