All blogs look the same…

At least to me, and this is how they look:

Judging by my stats and the referrers, that is the same for a lot of people – not necessarily using the same RSS reader, but one of the dozens out there.

The reason is simple: Time. I simply don’t have the time to surf around all the blogs I like to read, which is why I chose to stick to the RSS feeds and netvibes to collate them all ( in case you’re interested in what I read, here are my subscriptions in OPML format ). And after all this is what blogging is about: Writing and syndicating/linking to others.

That said, I keep finding posts about “Redesign of my blog”, “new blog design” or even “Sneak preview of my upcoming blog design”. Frankly, I couldn’t care less – unless you create a step by step tutorial as to why you have redesigned (which should be something like “increasing readability/usability” and not “to add this new gizmo”) and what tricks you used to overcome browser issues and you offer the templates for download.

What I’d rather like to read is things like “How I sold a good practice of blogs to a client”, “How I proved that web standards make a difference to a client” or “How I integrated CSS in an older CMS or framework – the issues and their solutions”, but sadly enough these are rare.

Talk of “we won the web standard war” is all over the place, and, to me, is premature until there are commercial solutions, frameworks and large sites that really embrace not only the syntax but the idea of standards – which includes that not every browser gives the same result but according to what it can support.

If you are bored with CSS or you think we’ve achieved it all – I guess you never had to face a project that’s been around for a while with clients that just don’t want talk but cheap quick solutions. Once we cracked these situations, it’s time for celebration.