Plato’s Beard

A most unscientific blog comparison!

And the winner is: Think Progress! ;-)

With some props to Kos and Malkin. My own favourite site, C&L, seems to have fared the worst!

The All Important Notes

The other day, I decided to see how compliant my blog is, and found this useful site: UITest. It collects a bunch of tests together in one page. Well I fared quite poorly (see below). If I am going down, I am bloody well taking the rest of you down with me! And so, I decided to test out some of the popular blogs. Please do not take this as a serious evaluation! It is highly unscientific and utterly silly

There are things I would have liked to measure, such as how blog reader friendly a blog is, but that would require actual effort!

Test environment: Firefox 1.5, screen 1024×768, 12pt Helvetica (default font)

The Blogs and Ranks

• HuffPo = The Huffington Post
• dKos = Daily Kos
• C&L = Crooks and Liars
• TProg = Think Progress
• Malkin = Michelle Malkin
• PwrLine = PowerLine

The rank is based on Technorati ranking of blogs as of Oct 10,
2006 or thereabouts. The URLs used for testing where the ones
listed in the Technorati listing. Some of these blogs/bloggers
have more than one blog (HuffPo, Malkin), in which case I
chose the higher ranked one. Also, I wanted a partisan blog
shootout and had to make judgement calls: I did not include
InstaPundit and Little Green Footballs. You may disagree!

Times are in seconds.

Validity

• W3C XHTML is XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• W3C HTML is HTML 4.01 Transitional
• If a site passed XHTML 1.0 no need to test HTML 4.01
• Truwex is a report of a range of issues
• Spelling was filtered for names, nicknames, acronyms, popular word corruptions, etc.
• Special kudos to C&L for getting the spelling of dialogue right, and Michelle Malkin for getting neighbour right!

Accessibility

• Frankly, I do not know a lot about these guidelines and tests.
• The ATRC test reports known, likely and potential problems: I have listed the known and included the total in brackets.
• The UIUC FAE test lists 5 main categories and provides % of failures for each: I have crudely added all the %s together.
• WebXACT results are broken down by 3 priorities and lists errors and warnings: I have added up the error incidents.

Subjective

• One thing I hate more than all else is the single-window assumption: anything larger than 750-800 pixels should be banished back to the times before windowing and multi-tasking!
• Design… well, that's really subjective isn't it? Along with aesthetics, I look for consistency of UI, use of colour, contrast, spacing, use of markup, and so on. Malkin for example uses "***" as markup… surely better options are available? Malkin and ThinkProgress (and to a lesser extent PowerLine) have an uncluttered and well-structured interface.
• Many folks read blogs through a blog reader that may list only post headings: are these clear enough to tell me what the post is about?
• And what about the post contents? Don't you hate cryptic one-liners which serve as a link to an external page with the real info? ThinkProgress, C&L, and Malkin (to a lesser extent) seem to enjoy this sport.
• What's a blog without a feed? How clear and prominent is/are the feed link(s)? If your feed link says "XML" you get a negative point! If it uses the new standardised feed icon, you get a positive.
• How cluttered and crazy is the sidebar? Are tags or categories offered for readers to focus on their area of interest?
• To give you an idea of spelling errors I found: Kos: whever, TProg: prescise, Malkin: afor.

A look at the Glass House

How did Plato's Beard fare?

• Spell: 0 errors! How would I know?
• Seomoz page strength: cannot even fetch the page
• MS Adcenter says: neutral (0.5) under 18 years (24.17%)
• Truwex Page check: 22 issues
• Size/speed: 201kB, 40.17s (56K), 1.26s (T1)
• ATRC: 14 known, 0 likely, 286 potential
• UIUC: 201
• W3C: XHTML 1.0 Trans: 84 errors, HTML 4.01 Trans: 53 errors
• Width: 700px
• Headings: B
• Feed Link(s): A
• Content(s): zero ;-)