Blogocular directory

The best way to judge a book isn’t by its cover, but to open it up and get stuck in. So I tried to sign up for Blogoculars, a site that the owner claimed fitted into the category of sophisticated directory alongside chainki, swicki and bla.st. Is it?

Browser compliance.
Apple’s Safari is a standards compliant browser. Unfortunately, I couldn’t peel back the address bar on the browser window to see the sign-up info in the header of the blogocular page. Never mind. Mac users are determined too – as a minority, you have to be – so I fired up Firefox, and voila, a full webpage appeared.

Blogocular’s directory layout
First impressions for first-time visitors who land on the site are good. Clear, simple, sharp. The directory’s navigation is divided into a manageable 18 sections. Comedy was the closest to The Pisstakers genre. This category was actually quite an improvement on other directories where humor doesn’t even figure sometimes.

Signing up to Blogocular
The signing-up process was simple, apart from unnecessarily having to hunt for a link to the Terms. (I had to agree to them before joining, so I felt obliged to check them out.) Nothing to hide, so how about a link right there on the form?

In theory all was hunkydory easy and I should have been listed very easily. Unfortunately Mac Mail junk filters are a wee bit too smart and I haven’t managed to receive the authorization email yet. Perhaps the site owner could post the salient part of the email address on the form so we can go ahead of time to our email preferences and divert their impending mail away from the junk folder?

How users use the directory
What do visitors see when they land on the site? Clarity! Click on a category in the heading and the relevant blogs appear. Click on a blog and go through to a list of recent posts. Each post entry in the directory is based on an Atom or RSS feed, which means you get a title and the first lines of the original text.

Features
There is tracking and voting and all the usual good stuff, including stars. And the ads aren’t too intrusive. But the killer feature for me is the scrolling iFrame, which means you can scroll through massive lists without losing track of where you are on the main page. Most cool in my opinion, and I wonder why they didn’t use the same system throughout the site structure.

Blogocular, winner or loser?
It is a lot better presented than most directories, because there is no sense of structural massiveness, thanks to lots of good old whitespace and that scrolling iFrame. On the other hand, Blogocular is text only, so whilst it loads quick, web 2 freaks could argue that it is a bit utilitarian. Maybe site thumbnails wouldn’t be a bad compromise? And if the categories could be expanded perhaps with dropdown sub-categories off the basic list, and let users add their own categories, maybe it can stay organized and will never grow into a morass of blogs.

Although I don’t hold out much hope that the Blogocular directory will generate mega amounts of traffic for The Pisstakers tech or blogger review blogs, it is probably a good time to get your blog listed before the directory behind the elegant front becomes a sprawling list. Enjoy watching the PR benefits accumulate over time, and of course, discover lots of fab blogs.

And hey, the 143 Safari users out there could sure do with a glimpse of the header!

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