My Sports Blog

Looks clean. I think the three rules to run a successful blog are:

1. Clean look
2. Regular updates (to keep people coming back)
3. Good spelling and grammar

 

Your writing's pretty good. I noticed sometimes the punctuation would be off. For example you'd forget to put a space after a comma or period. Also play around with the color combos to get a better looking theme. It looks like your text is grey, I think it would look better if it was white against that black background.

Also be mindful of how wordpress auto-resizes pictures to fit its dimensions. Some of the pics are awfully distorted.

Keep up the good work and like the guy above me said keep updating regularly.

 

Good start. I think you should add more interactivity like user polls and maybe even a chatbox. Also, having humor is a major plus and if you can be funny you will get more readers.

 

Looks like you've been paying attention to Ms. McCall or Mr. White, or whoever your English teacher is

I'm a westside alum, and I approve

 

Content is good. I am not such an avid Astros fan, but I like your discussion and for starters, it's good. I am hoping that because you're calling this a "HoustonSports" blog, you add stuff about the Dynamo, Texans, Aeros, and Rockets, not just Astros.

No, he hasn't, and you haven't either... you missed your last period . He forgets to add a period and capitalize when there are commas in there. The sentences seem like run-ons.

Know when to stop your sentences and begin new ones; you can also get away without conjunctions by using semicolons. They're your friends. Avoid repeating people's names so much, like saying "Cecil Cooper" in the first paragraph, and repeating it again. Unless there is another Cooper down the story, use "Cooper" or "their manager"... saying "Cecil Cooper" continuously is redundant... like, saying Cecil Cooper again in this sentence when you know Cooper is the person of whom I am making a reference.

Your writing style is good, and it seems to me like you could be sitting at a TV Sports editorial desk and reading this off and coming off knowledgeable, but writing it for web might be different. Use commas where needed, add conjunctions and remove when unnecessary, etc.

Overall, it's good content and I like it.

In regards to the technical aspects of the web editing, photos like this one look distorted. Either use the original photos' dimensions, or scale them down with a photo editor to make them fit on your column. The players look shorter or skinnier if you don't keep the proportionate dimensions as the original photos'. The photos of Duncan and Fregosi can be made into smaller dimensions so you can fit them in a nicely proportionate layout on your blog. Also, you can add some borders to those photos just for looks. You need some links to other blogs or the official stats pages where you got your info, so people believe you more.

Remove your initial "Hello World!" sample post. I know, you forgot.

 

See my reply in the thread you started in the Houston sports forum.

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showpost.php?p=4815888&postcount=4

 

I'm with SwoLy-D.

I'm not a baseball fan so I didn't read the whole column, but what I did read suffered from sub par punctuation and grammar. It actually isn't all that bad in general, but it certainly is for an aspiring writer.

Sure, there are tons of people who are more than willing to overlook these "minor" technical mistakes...and there are probably just as many who will not. For those people, bad grammar and punctuation is often a pet peeve. They will likely not finish reading your blog, and will likely never come back.

Do you really want to cut out half of your audience over grammar mistakes? Of course not.

So make it your top priority to get the technical side of your writing up to snuff. Everything else builds off of that.

As a web designer, I'd say that the gray text works just fine. White on black is the ultimate contrast, and when it's presented in big globs of text (like on a blog) it can be hard on some people's eyes. I've only dabbled in WordPress on a couple of occasions, but I imagine they have an option to adjust line spacing. Increasing it to roughly 140% of default (ie. use line spacing of 20pt for 14pt font) will make your text more readable and less strenuous on the eyes.

I would also look into making your orange text a little closer to red. If you intend to cover all Houston Sports, then the red will work for Astros, Rockets, Texans, and even Cougars. Right now your page looks a bit like Halloween with all the orange (which I suppose is appropriate this time of year, but probably not your intention).

Anyway, good luck with the blog. Remember to keep it updated.

 

Gross.

 

You would know.

 

That's what SHE said . Hey, I've been sick...

 

That why I said it!

 

Sincerely,


Dikembe "That two Ticket!" Mutombo

 

^ See that? Don't be afraid to press the space bar after a period. It helps with the reading. Usually, in paper form, you'd do two spaces. When it's on the InterWebs, it doesn't really matter anymore. HTML doesn't let you do two spaces after the period... but add one space at least after every period in a paragraph.

 

It is a decent enough blog. I like the potential FA parts. Boone was signed to a minimum deal, so there is not discounted price for him. If he plays again it will continue to be for the minimum or a minor league deal, but he would probably retire rather than take a deal like that. There are some other things in there that I would question, but a blog is opinion so I'll leave that alone.

 

That's what she - nevermind

 

I lol'd

 

Just got a chance to check back on this thread. I took a look at that latest entry and I ran into grammar and punctuation problems again.

In my opinion, it should probably read more like this...

The most glaring problem to me is the lack of spaces between sentences. If you want to be respected as a writer, you must put a space between sentences. I don't know where you developed the habit of running everything together, but it's not acceptable in the writing "world". You also had a couple of commas out of place (or completely missing) that made your sentence read awkwardly.

I'm sure all of this seems like nitpicking, but it's really not. All the little mistakes people make in their writing can really add up, and at a certain point it becomes a chore for a reader to process all the noise those mistakes are making. They'll give up and go away, which is the last thing a blog writer should want.

I hope you can take this criticism and use it to improve your skills, because I'm honestly just trying to help.

 

Dude, make use of lists in HTML instead of dashed paragraphs the way you're listing the candidates. The space goes BEFORE the parenthesis. Two examples with all this combined:

• Tim Bogar (Boston Red Sox current first base coach)
• Brad Mills (Boston Red Sox bench coach)

Instead of
-Tim Bogar( Boston Red Sox current first base coach)
-Brad Mills( Boston Red Sox bench coach)

Overall, the content is what matters. If you add some variety to the HTML and to the regular text on the content, your readers won't get bored with just paragraph after paragraph. Like CCR, I am also trying to help, sir. Keep up the good work.