CSS || images || 800x600+ || NS4+ / IE4+
2003-06-13 - annachan

first impressions
older.html: Milky coffee-coloured background, scrolly div with Shannen Doherty in the layout pic. Very nice. :)
entries: Match archives layout. I'm starting with 405.html

general aesthetics
Excellent. :) The general colour theme is beige/brown and it works very well. Text looks like Trebuchet MS at 12px and everything is legible. Except, ah, links are the same colour as text. Hmmm, links are bold. Okay. But visited and unvisited are the same colour. Phooey.
2.5 points

layout
Gorgeous. :) I'm no particular fan of Shannen but she is photogenic, and the diarist made the layout herself, and visually everything's dandy. Well, apart from the link colours.
2.5 points
2.5 bonus points

user-friendliness
Very good. :) Hover cursor is a hand, hover effect is a darker shade of brown, and I can see the bar of the scrollbar. Just wish visited and unvisited links were different colours.
2.5 points

navigation
Some navigation & links are in a drop-down, which I don't like much, but forward and back appear under the entry, and there's a "last five" under that, so on the whole it's okay.
0 points

continuity
Pretty much daily, with some multiples. Well done. :)
5 points

comprehension
Punctuation's a bit spotty and the grammar fluctuates, but spelling is fine apart from a few obvious typos. Complete sentences, regular capitalisation. Nothing seriously bad.
0 points

content
It's a bit soap-opera-ish, where, if you don't have a good understanding of the characters' relationship to each other, one "episode" is much like the next. The narrative is mostly concerned with what she did and said and doesn't seem to be much about what she feels. Comes across as slightly shallow. This is a diary that will make sense to people who know the writer, not one you can drop in and read a part of and get into straight away.

4th period. The one period in the day that I could never get tired of, but no, not today! Mr. Allen decided to be a mean bitch and said that we had to practice today. So I asked him if we had to play tomorrow if we played today. He answered no. So I played the whole period, and then he says, "we'll continue tomorrow." And I just think, what kind of a teacher is that?! It really pissed me off.
#422 - One of those horrible days
0 points

contact
Email and guestbook are listed in the drop-down. Email in a drop-down is bad because not everyone has an integrated mail client & browser. I'm gonna have to view the source to find out what her email address is.
2.5 points

link back
No. There is a reviews page, but it's not there. In her words: "If you don't see your review site on here anymore. Too bad. You either took too long with the review, or I felt the review site was shut down, so there was no point in keeping the link." Impatient, much?
-2.5 points

extras
Hit counter and imood in the template. Groovy.
5 points

my comments

Good design, and, on the whole, good writing in a technical sense, but not a diary with wide appeal. I figure you need to be a RL friend of the diarist or else about the same age and in the same academic stage at school to get anything out of this one. Or else a band junkie. ;) Another 5 bonus points for English not being your first language (because you're a lot more coherent than many "natives").

Archive structure is good - archiving is per two months, with archiving due again at the end of June.

scores
Total negative points: -2.5
Total positive points: 20
Number of neutral scores: 3
Final score: 67.5/100 plus 7.5 bonus points

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