a sorta fairytale

a sorta fairytale

***-- (Rated by 6 people, viewed by 118 people)

This is my personal website and blog.

Added by teachertim in Personal

a sorta fairytale has 6 Reviews

Below are the reviews left by other members on a sorta fairytale. Jump to review form?

  1. [img: avatar]
    Taversia gave it ***-- on 29th Jun 2009 and said:

    Hi Tim; I'm Taversia and I'll be reviewing your site with Internet Explorer 8 as my browser... (I suppose so far, I might be the only one amidst the Firefoxers that came before me) :P

    What caught my attention first about your site were the Tori Amos lyrics, which is what initially drove me to reviewing you in the first place. You are a man of great taste, in my book! At least in terms of music. The layout...? Not so much. The text is a little blocky and cluttered-looking and there is a mild .jpg-induced loss of quality around the header image. I know, nitpicky... But I'm all about first impressions, and a layout is exceptionally important, especially for a personal site such as yours, because it helps to define who you are and what you're all about. Reading through your site, you express a lot of personality that condradicts the bland, grayscale appearance of your layout.

    That being said, I shall now touch up on each of the sections of your site...

    THE BOY:

    I actually really enjoyed your short introduction. It said a lot about you, in a nutshell. What I don't like about this particular section of your site is the list of likes and dislikes. I saw a wall of text which discouraged me from reading through it all, and I'm probably not the first to feel this way. Perhaps it could be displayed a bit more neatly, like with bullet notes? I think that would go over a lot better. What I would do, is perhaps lay out two rows of bullet notes side-by-side so as not to stretch out the iframe scrollbar, as you do have a fairly sizable list. Might I suggest div tables?

    THE STORY:

    Oh, a blog! Nifty! I didn't expect that when I clicked it... And it fits rather neatly in that relatively small iframe of yours. The font style is easy to read, but just small enough that it looks tidy and organized. Each of the blog posts I've read were also quite enjoyable for me to go through, as well. You reference Garfield quite a bit though, don't you? I totally believe you when you say you have every episode of Garfield & Friends!

    THE SITE:

    Your credits were very amusing. I'm not sure anyone would steal your layout from you though, even in jest. hehe. :) I only wish you had more content here... Linking back buttons? Perhaps links to friend's sites and/or sites you regularly frequent and enjoy? I dunno, things like that! I actually like to look at that kind of stuff. I'm a very visual web surfer, and the more things there are for me to look at, the more intrigued I will be.

    THE EXTRAS:

    Oh, speak of the devil! A wall of joined fanlistings... I like it! This also serves as a deeper look into your life, and the sort of things you appreciate. It's also nice that you have links to offsite contact information... On that note, your Twitter username made me giggle.

    SO! All in all, I can honestly say that I do like your site. I would probably return every so often just to read up on your blog, but that would be it. Other than that, your site has no particularly outstanding qualities that would draw me in. It is a very small site; quaint, and cut to the point.

    I give you a solid 3 stars. :)

    Using MSIE on Windows | Report This?

  2. [img: avatar]
    superawr gave it **--- on 1st May 2009 and said:

    Hi, my name is Desiree and I'll be reviewing your website. I'm viewing in Firefox with a resolution of 1440x900.

    I'm sort of wondering how long it took you to throw this layout together. It looks very rushed and the grayscale color scheme you chose doesn't look good. Everything is so plain and there is a ton of white space. Your content area is way too small... and you're using iframes. This may just be personal preference, but I cannot stand iframes. You should really look into using PHP includes - there are some great tutorials out there and I think you'll really like coding that way, rather than with iframes.

    --The Boy--
    The first paragraph definitely caught my attention. In fact, the whole section is very well-written and interesting. I would like to suggest using a different listing style, however. Just using the semicolons is making all the words sort of bleed together and I'm less likely to actually read it. If it were in actual list form, I probably would.

    --The Story--
    Oh, this just goes back to your blog. I really had no idea that was going to happen. I think this link should be either at the top or bottom of your navigation, but that might just be my personal preference talking again.

    --The Site--
    I'm laughing at the last sentence here! Very good ending. You're using WordPress, yay! I love WordPress. This section looks fine to me.

    --The Extras--
    This section is well-organized.

    Your website's content is nice and well put-together, but the layout needs a lot of work. It just doesn't appeal to me at all. A little color could be added! With the next layout change I suggest getting rid of those iframes and making the content box quite a bit bigger.
    Good luck to your website in the future :)

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    teachertim's Response:

    Thanks for the comments. I've since gotten rid of the iframes and I made the content box a little bigger. Not TOO much bigger, because my resolution is lower. You guys use crazy resolutions! Monitors at my job don't even support those! So I wanted to make it to where everyone could see it.

    As for the general design, yes, it's plain. Maybe I'm weird, but I like simplicity. I seem to be in the minority here, but that's OK. My next layout will probably be more colorful.

    Thanks for the tips!

  3. [img: avatar]
    Chien gave it **--- on 28th Apr 2009 and said:

    Hey there Tim, I'm going to review your site so bear with me for a bit (: A warning beforehand, I can be sarcastic or rude. I apologise beforehand for anything that may be offensive to you.

    Mozila Firefox 3.0.9 at 1280x800 resolution.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    First Impression
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    A box, a star... What? And completely black and white? And a wand?

    Knowing that the site owner is a guy, I am particularly amused by the wand. This also catches my attention, not bad. Apart from that, nothing appeals to me.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Layout & Coding (mostly general stuff)
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Upon looking at your layout, I felt that everything I saw was done in a rush. The overall design showed that it lacked effort, no offense. And having everything squished to the left did not help either. I usually look at the center of my screen first - I don't like my eyes drifting to the left. It makes me feel as if it was pointless to even have a big screen resolution!

    Intrigued by your unique reviewing system, I honestly thought that you had something special for me to see, but I felt disappointed.

    Oh god, iframes, one of my internet pet peeves. Your current layout could be better, with everything intact. Your content area is too small. It's suffering from weborexia.

    This (http://i44.tinypic.com/wm1nuv.gif) is a rough design sketch I did to show you how I'd carry it out minus weborexia. See how I kept to the original design but just added spacing and changed some fonts?

    Tsk tsk tsk. I thought you used CuteNews or something similar because of your lack of portrayal of pretty link structures. With WordPress, I don't see the need to make separate html files for each individual page. WordPress has a very good pages function, and while it's there, why not make use of it?

    Looking into your coding, I noticed that your coding for all pages is completely messed up. I don't have time to validate everything, but I spot errors easily.

    Your HTML is valid but it is missing a DOCTYPE. Your doctype is currently a weird one, something I've never seen before!

    <!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM>

    ... what? You should check out the doctypes here: http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

    Not only that, but several of your pages have invalid HTML as well. They are missing doctypes.

    You've linked to an invalid CSS file (http://tim.fan-dome.net/story/ line 2). Not only that, you've placed that tag incorrectly.

    <link /> goes into the head tag, not before it. You should read up on valid HTML or use available HTML & CSS Valid Templates such as http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/css-templates.php and http://www.freecsstemplates.org/

    I also see that you are using Capricorn (http://wp-themes.com/capricorn/) for your theme. If you have modified it, I think a link back would be nice, even though you totally destroyed it. It looks nothing like the original.

    I'm not a fan of the image maps either. A List Apart has something about it here (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/imagemap/), and at the same time, if you've successfully carried it out, you're nearly a CSS guru. Well, nearly.

    Your CSS is messy as well. You can use styleneat.com to straighten things out. And colours should start with a hex sign (#) if it is not a named colour. Aside from that hex codes that repeat such as #ffffff should instead be #fff. #AA0099 should be #a09 and so forth.

    You are using pts for your css. pts are used for printing, but since your page is for browsers, I suggest using em. You can read more about these metric units at http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_units.asp. You can also check out this page for quick and easy reference: http://sureshjain.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/53/

    I particularly dislike the bold text when you mouse over a visited link. It moves everything down. Either make it bold, or drop it for hovering.

    But most areas of concern have already been covered by other reviewers.

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Content
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    THE BOY
    Quite interesting, it urged me to read further, but I couldn't stand your lists. You can style <ul>s and <ol> with CSS, so maybe you can use that instead of semicolons. Everything is in one huge chunk and it made me bored. I wouldn't go through unorganized links because I get lost easily, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one.

    THE STORY
    I had no idea that this linked to the entries. I thought it would be something else. I usually prefer the link to be at the top of all your links than others because it makes it easy for me to navigate through other parts of your site. Your entries on the other hand are well written, but I felt very claustrophobic because of your skinny content area.

    THE SITE
    I think you should credit the creator of Capricorn for providing the base code for your WordPress design too?

    THE EXTRAS
    I'd consider this as a "linkage" page. When I see 'extras' I expect something special for the visitors. What I get from you is more like a contact feature. If it were me I'd call the page "etcetera"

    MY REV.IEW.ME RULES
    Your rules? I think it's more towards "my rev.iew.me review rating guidelines". Wow, a completely different rating system, though by my own review standards I consider it lacking. Ah well, I cannot limit you to your review styles.

    You should center the whole design since it's too squished up on the left. You have a border already, so it's okay to be in the center!

    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Overall & General Advice
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Your site looks promising, suffice to say. I'm giving two stars.

    All you need is a better layout and better coding skills. Throw away the iframes; it's chasing away potential visitors who know that iframes are the thing of the past and feel iframes as an eyesore.

    Read some HTML and CSS tutorials. Good places to start out are http://tutorialtastic.co.uk and http://w3schools.com. You can also check online magazines and articles like http://smashingmagazine.com and http://alistapart.com.

    You can also use PHP includes to make things easier. http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/php_includes is a nice tutorial to get you started up. You can also check the WordPress Codex, http://codex.wordpress.org/, since you use WordPress. The WordPress Codex explains WordPress codes nicely. If you want to further expand your site with WordPress, http://webdesignerwall.com gives rather neat tutorials that could help.

    Good luck with your site!

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    teachertim's Response:

    Thanks. I am going to change the coding system with a new layout soon. It'll take me a while to get the hang of the PHP stuff, but I guess the second time I do it, it'll be easier.

    And for some reason, and I know I seem to be the oddball on this, it doesn't seem natural for me to look to the center. We read from left to right, so that seems natural to me. I'm just weird, I guess. I'll be changing the layout soon, anyway.. whenever I get around to it, at least, haha.

    UPDATED 28 Apr 09:
    PS: I also didn't think of crediting the person who created the theme, for whatever reason, so thanks for that as well.

    UPDATED 04 May 09:
    FYI, I did make some of the changes you suggested (mainly, getting rid of iframes like everyone has said, haha).

    Some other suggestions were valid too, but I am putting them off until I redo the layout.

    Thanks again for the tips.

  4. [img: avatar]
    Pocci gave it ****- on 27th Apr 2009 and said:

    Hey Tim :) I'm going to be reviewing your site with Firefox on a 1280 by 800 resolution. Highly sorry if your site doesn't work on my browser or resolution.

    First impressions + layout
    Lucky for you, it loads fast otherwise I would be going on about how it broke my internet. Anyways, you have a really simple layout. It doesn't exactly look like you put much effort in it, looks like you slapped an image on, made a box for your content and voila, your done. As well as that, the white background on your site is really plain. Doesn't show that you really care about the layout.

    & Also, I think your using frames. If you are, get rid of them & get PHP includes :D

    Content

    "The boy" - The first paragraph was really intriguing, grabbed my attention so I had to keep reading. Very interesting, love your style of writing. Keep it up! :]

    "The site" - Nicely done. No spelling or grammatical errors.

    "The extras" - Remove the borders on the fanlisting icons...they're distracting.

    Overall
    I'm going to give you 3 1/2 stars because I found most your pages entertaining, 1 1/2 off for the layout, sorry. I'm a very first impressions girl.

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    teachertim's Response:

    I got rid of the iframes and the borders on the images. I finally found the one little line in wordpress that was doing it (not my idea originally, haha).

    What would you suggest instead of a white background? I wouldn't know what else to do there that wouldn't affect readability.

    Thanks for the comments!

  5. [img: avatar]
    Vera gave it **--- on 26th Apr 2009 and said:

    I didn't initially plan to review your site, but the message in your description intrigued me. After all what's so complicated about a rating system that you'd need to explain? Since I couldn't manage find this information even after going through the main link sections 3 times, I thought I might as well write a review.

    = First Impression =
    ------------------------------------
    A gray scale layout, huh? That's really brave of you, but unfortunately the end result doesn't look particularly appealing.

    = Presentation =
    -------------------------
    A star-topped magical wand? Well that's rather unusual, for a boy. I would expect 10-year-old girls to use such a header image. Ah well, on the other hand it fits one of my criteria for effective header images. The star certainly attracts quite a bit of my attention.

    Overall, the layout looks like a 2004 i-frame reject. My screen resolution is 1280x1024px, and I get a large white area, with a bit of text towards the left. At least center it, since most people tend to look towards the middle of their browser window.

    Personally, I don't really care whether you follow current or past trends. Nevertheless, the layout's featuring i-frames have long since been dumped for other alternatives. First of all, if people search for your site using a search engine, there's a high probability for them to land on some page OTHER than the main pages. In this case, they wouldn't even have access to the main navigation.
    Second, it makes bookmarking one of your pages rather tedious. They'd have to find the inner page, displayed inside the i-frame. Sure, browsers like Firefox have an option to show only the page in the frame... but a lot of users use IE, which makes things more difficult. Besides, if people can't find the right page to bookmark within , say, 10 seconds they're likely to just give up and never visit.

    You seem to have some sort of fascination with all caps... well at least as far as the navigation goes. There's no set rule against this, only it looks rather tacky with the font you used. What more? It's an image map too. While I'm not one to use more than 2-3 decorative images in a layout, I can understand the appeal. In sites like http://amourchaleur.com they can add some subtle enhancements to sections of the layout/text/etc. The text that you're using in the left sidebar, as well as right bellow the site title, has no special decoration to it. I'm assuming it's some sans-serif type of font. You could have easily used plain text for them.

    Furthermore, the image map that you employ has been long since deemed inadvisable, as far as accessibility goes. If you really want to use an image map, try the following one: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/imagemap/
    Still, given your current design, you'd only need to use 2 images: the star-topped wand and the site title (since not everyone might have that script-y font installed). Everything else can be done using HTML and CSS. The following article explains how to do it: http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/converting_from_iframes

    The text, right bellow the site title has a misspelled word: CANT. There should be an apostrophe before the T. Also the tail of the y (from the word Fairytale) makes it seem like the word PUT is BUT. At a closer look, I could see the very subtle difference between the gray shades. Nevertheless from a superficial view, the P looks like a D.

    All in all, if I weren't here to review you, I'd have left after 2 seconds. Your layout is extremely bland, even compared to such layouts as the classic and default Wordpress themes. Furthermore, your text is cramped into an extremely small space, displaying about 1 paragraph per screen. Let's hope that your content at least makes up for it.

    = Content =
    ----------------------

    The boy - your first sentence makes me raise my eyebrows in a questioning manner. So yeah, the subdomain name is your name, but I don't really see how that's humorous. Or is it humorous that you had to tell us that it's your name? Your seconds sentence gives me some hope that there might be something interesting coming of this... only to be (once again) bewildered by the lat sentence alluding to game introductions. I guess you must have watched some pretty boring games, then.
    The "off the wall" description is quite nice and would love to read more of that. Unfortunately, you decide to use a list for the likes and dislikes. At least make use of proper list tags (ul, ol), instead of simply separating the items with a semi-colon. This article explains how to do it: http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/customising_the_unordered_list_tag

    The story - your blog entries are incredibly entertaining. And if it were easier to read them, I'd probably tell you that I'd definitely return for more. Sure I might still drop by from time to time, but I'd likely prefer a less well written entry with a more accessible layout.

    The site - love the last sentence of the credits. :D
    So you use Wordpress? Great! Then you can switch to the classic theme (the default is overused) instead. It would really give your site so much better chances at being noticed.

    The extras - I'd suggest using a light gray border instead of a black one for the fanlisting pictures. Possibly with the shade (of gray) changing upon hover.

    = Coding =
    --------------------------
    Where exactly did you learn about the following doctype?

    <!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM>

    The correct doctype for pages containing i-frames is HTML4.1 Transitional (since you're using HTML):

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

    You can find all available doctypes in the following article: http://w3schools.com/tags/tag_doctype.asp None of them is what you used.
    You don't seem to have opened the html tag, but you DO seem to close it. Put an opening html tag after the doctype tag.

    I see you use an external stylesheet, yet your i-frame still sports inline CSS declarations. Define a class or id for it, and set these attributes for said class/id within the external CSS file.

    Your interior pages (the ones displayed within the i-frame) also need doctype and character set meta tags. Though I see here that they have the opening html tag, so I assume that the former error is more a slip-up than lack of proper coding knowledge.
    From the code of the about page, I see that you use a lot of line breaks (br tags) to simulate paragraphs. There is a specific paragraph tag (p) for this, so use it. For headings don't use the bold tag (b). First of all the b tag is deprecated (use strong instead), second there are header tags which you can use (and style using CSS): h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6.

    For example, to have bolder uppercase headings within an h2 tag, you would have the following in your CSS:

    h2 { text-transform: uppercase;
    font-weight: bold; }

    In your CSS, colors defined using hexadecimal numbers (also known as hex codes) need to have the # character in front of them. For example:

    color: #ffffff;

    If you have a color code where all 6 characters are the same, it is considered better coding practice to use the short code for them. Type out only the first three characters. As such the code for white (#ffffff) would become #fff.

    On web pages, don't use points (pt) for font-sizes, as these are only for printing purposes. Use relative font-sizes such as em of percentages. For a font-size of 11-12px (9-10pt) you'd use 0.8em or 75%. If you decide to use the latter, you should also specify a line height of about 1.6em.
    So a good font declaration would look as follows (this is just my way of defining them):

    font: 75%/1.6em Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif;

    As you notice, I contracted multiple font related declaration into a single one. This is also good coding practice: whenever possible, try to put the related CSS attribute within one declaration. This is to lessen the file size, as well as loading time and bandwidth usage.

    You can read more about relative font sizes in the following article: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/relafont/

    There's no need to repeat CSS declarations for the same thing for all pseudo-classes (eg: :hover and :visited are pseudo-classes for the anchor tag). You can specify the common attributes once for the main tag, and then only specify the needed changes for the pseudo-classes.
    For example, your CSS declaration for the anchor tag (a ) could be written as:

    a { text-decoration: none;
    color:#74777c;
    font-weight: bold;}

    a:visited { font-weight: normal;}

    The attribute values for text-decoration do not include bold: http://w3schools.com/css/pr_text_text-decoration.asp That's a font related attribute.
    Same way: none of the attribute values for font-weight include none: http://w3schools.com/css/pr_font_weight.asp

    As you can see, I did not include the font-family and font-size declarations because they are the same as the ones you defined within the body tag, so these attributes' values will be automatically inherited.

    I noticed that you alternate the style of coding for your CSS. Try to maintain a consistent one, so as to make bug fixing and maintenance easier. I'd personally suggest the style which you defined the CSS for the body tag, but if a different one works better for you, that's fine too. Just be consistent.

    In the one of the blog entries I noticed that you used "new" as the value for the target attribute (presumably to open a link in a new window). There is no "new" value within the possible ones for this attribute: http://w3schools.com/tags/att_a_target.asp The one you are looking for is "_blank".

    As a general rule, avoid opening links in new windows. Users should be able to choose where they want to open the links they click on. Every moder browser allows you to choose whether or not to open a link in a new browser or not. Besides, a lot of people tend to have more than a few windows open while browsing. As such they might not appreciate having yet ANOTHER window opened for them.

    For i-frames, you should use either "_parent" or "_top" to open extrenal links in the main window. For the layouts not using frames, just leave it blank, as the target attribute is deprecated anyway.

    You might argue that it's difficult to remember all these attributes. You always check possible errors by validating your code. If you're not sure how to fix them, go to http://w3schools.com and look up the definition of the HTML tag/attribute or the CSS attribute.

    Score: 2/5

    All in all, your site shows great promise, but the tiny i-frame is likely going to alienate a lot of visitors. I'm not one to put a lot of emphasis on the layout. If you had chosen a layout similar to the Wordpress default one, making the star-topped wand the header image, I would have definitely given you a 3/5 or 4/5 star rating.

    You also need to read up on the most recent HTML coding practices, and learn CSS properly.
    For starting out, I suggest the articles on http://tutorialtastic.co.uk . And after you have read those, just refer to http://w3schools.com if you're unsure about using tags/attributes.

    By the way, I still can't find the explanation for your rating. I'm assuming I shouldn't need to spend more than an hour for it (the time it took me to write this review).

    Using Firefox on Windows | Report This?

    teachertim's Response:

    Thanks for the info. I will keep this in mind the next time I re-vamp.

    UPDATED 04 May 09:
    FYI, I followed some of your suggestions; I at least got rid of the iframes, finally. Some of the other stuff I am still putting off until I do a new layout. Again, thanks!

  6. Aashni gave it ****- on 25th Apr 2009 and said:

    Heya! I'm going to be reviewing your site today! I try to be fair, and use constructive criticism (we're all learning). I'm just waiting for your site to load (I have extremley slow internet connection where i live :( ) I use Firefox 5.0 on my Mac.

    ** First Impressions ++ Layout :D **
    It's very plain and simple, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. I don't like how the content has to fit into such a small box - with people who have a high resolution computer (like me), it makes it harder to see. Maybe make the box slightly larger?
    I like the navigation - simple, and self-explanatory.
    You use I-frame styled layouts, which aren't bad, but it makes it harder for sites like google to find you, or the information on your site. You may want to try and get them into a php includes styled website. There are some great tutorials on the web, which can be found at Memorylsat, Tutorialtastic, or Figmint. I may be adding one to my site soon as well, and if you get stuck, please feel free to ask me.

    ** Content **
    The Boy: Very interesting, and I like the way you have listed them differently, bringing in your personality into the text. I didn't find any spelling errors in this.

    The Story: This was well structured as well, having a lot of information in the blog format. Read a few of your blogs, and they are extremely interesting. They show your personality (which is important), as well as have very few if any grammatical mistakes.

    The Site: Nicely laid out, fits well in your blog, and is truthful - doesn't have any spelling mistakes. Maybe put credit to your host up here as well..?

    The Extras: You have a really great and varied collection of information here, though it looks a little plain. You may want to add in a little about each site, or some other way to show what each of the sites your linking to are about...

    ** Final Impressions **
    Your site is really good, it's simple, and subtle, though it feels a little empty in its layout - try to add a background to it. Also try to get out of Iframes, and into something else, like PHP Includes for your layout. You should try and add some more pages, maybe about you, or things you like. Do you have any hobbies (you said you were a journalist - do you like taking photography? If you do, you could add a photography section to your site as well. )
    I think it's really interesting, and has some really funny blog posts!

    Keep up the great work!

    Using Firefox on Mac | Report This?

    teachertim's Response:

    I followed some of these suggestions, mainly getting rid of the iframes. What kind of background would you suggest that wouldn't affect readability? I may follow some of the others the next time I change the layout.

    Thanks for the tips!

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