1. Snap Shots. These are those little windows that pop up and give a preview of the link’s contents; they come standard on all new Wordpress.com blogs. They’re obviously of the devil since they cover real content, sometimes pop up unexpectedly, and only rarely display accurate information. By looking at this page, one can learn how to disable them as some of the Wordpress.com bibliobloggers have already done.
2. Separate page for posting/viewing comments. When you click to post a comment, some blogs (especially ones hosted by Blogger) take you to a separate page to enter your comments. No big deal, except sometimes you want to interact with the blog post itself and be able to have the text of the post in front of you when commenting. The same goes for reading the comments especially when it’s a long post and you want to be able to refer back and forth between the comments and post without having to open a new window or tab.
3. Truncated RSS. Most blogging software packages allow the administrator to post their RSS feeds as summaries instead of displaying the entire content of the post. This usually just means that they show the first fifty words or so of the post. As far as I understand it, by truncating posts in the RSS feed the blogger is forcing their reader to visit their site. This, of course, is great for the blogger, but a tad annoying for people reading their blog through RSS aggregators. Perhaps their is a legitimate reason for syndicating your blog posts in a mutilated form. I just don’t know of one.
4. Advertisements. We’re all used to advertisements and we see them all over the internet, but why are they necessary on a personal or academic blog? I’m not talking about those Westminster Bookstore banners that I see on various blogs, but what’s so annoying are those auto-generated spam ads. What’s with those? Also, as if advertising on a blog wasn’t bad enough, some make it worse is by including advertisements in their RSS feeds. Shame on you!
5. Cluttered Sidebars. I forgot about this one, but Nick Norelli mentioned it in the comments and I heartily agree. Here’s what Nick said: “Also annoying to me personally are extremely cluttered sidebars with every widget and/or graphic you can imagine. These look ghastly and make the pages take forever to load.”

Thoughts?

I also decided to change the template to one that is a little more robust and so I installed the Carrington theme by Crowd Favorite. There’s still a lot of work to be done on the aesthetics of the site, but it seems that everything is working correctly for now. Let me know if you run into any problems.

PS: I interviewed Doug last year for Biblioblogs.com, which you can read here.