News Direct is a humorous news blog dedicated to bringing you the best (and most “honest”) news from across the world. As soon as I visited a few things caught my eye:
The first thing was several of the images were hotlinked from different sources. Might wanna be careful with that - hotlinking is considered copyright infringement and it can result in deletion of a blogger blog. I doubt there’s anything malicious going on - just a simple misconception of the copyright laws. When in doubt - ask the site owner if you can use the image. Even if you do get permission to use an image - you’re much better off putting it on your own blog so there is less of a risk of having someone’s server make your blog load slowly.
The second thing is, just like the other blogspot blogs I reviewed, the RSS auto-discovery code doesn’t point to the FeedBurner feed. To switch that over just replace these two lines in the theme:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="News Direct - Atom" href="http://newsdirect-aningeniousname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="News Direct - RSS" href="http://newsdirect-aningeniousname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />With this code:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="News Direct - RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/NewsDirect" />The other thing I noticed is the interviews are a bit hard to follow. Maybe bolding the labels before each line would make them easier to follow?
My last little issue with it is the homepage is quite long. In fact, it’s about 160KB long. While that isn’t a problem for those of us with 10 megabit connections - there’s still quite a few people running slower connections.
Oh, and you might also wanna get rid of some of the “interesting” links on the bottom - they basically kill the blog.
Rating
My overall rating for News Direct is:
Content: 4/10 - The “interesting” links on the bottom and the long page are big turn offs.
Design: 7/10 - Nice and simple - Just bold more stuff and fix the RSS auto-discovery. Maybe even space text out a bit more. It also needs a regular search field on the sidebar.
Uniqueness: 8/10 - It’s unique - what else can I say?
Overall: 5/10 - It’s a bit funny, but the NSFW link and image on the bottom are major turn offs for me.
You can visit News Direct here, and subscribe to it here.
Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?
October 31st, 2007 at 11:07 am
Jeremy,
when you say hot linking to images is bad, and I agree but any images on my server I usually disallow hot linking via my htaccess
but lets say you google search an image and hotlink via that way, would that be considered copyright infringement? - I mean it is now scoured by public engines
October 31st, 2007 at 11:19 am
Any form of hotlinking without permission and without following the law is technically copyright infringement.
With that said - in my experience it is hard to get images taken off of forums and such. You’re better off sending them a bad image - then everyone knows not to take from you in the future.