Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

You’ve no doubt noticed that the pho­tos from my side­bar are miss­ing, turns out the Flickr API had been changed for 3–4 days and the staff aren’t actu­ally all that bothered about inform­ing users. Not impressed. So for now until I fix the issue, the main photo nav­ig­a­tion points to my account over at Flickr, as opposed to the fantabulous integ­rated gal­lery that I had going on. Not quite what I had in mind after fork­ing out for a “Pro” account so that I could house everything neatly in sets, but nevermind.

Else­where online, I’ve been accep­ted at Per­fec­tion. I applied on a whim hav­ing seen it linked on almost every blog I fre­quent and although I don’t think my site is totally cack, I thought I may be rejec­ted on the basis that my site doesn’t always val­id­ate (9 times out of the pro­ver­bial 10, it’s some way­ward plu­gin caus­ing havoc) and my lay­out has a tend­ency to com­pletely go to pot at res­ol­u­tions smal­ler than 1024x786.

As it rolls out, they didn’t think that my site was totally cack either, which is nice. Hav­ing been privy to the review­ing pro­cess now that I was a mem­ber, I’d star­ted to won­der what they’d all said about me (well, my blog — I know my blog isn’t “me” as such, but hey this is the inter­net and my site is all I have to put for­ward, for all intents and pur­poses my blog might as well be me). Had they pecked my little blog to bits? Did I just scrape through? Were they all busy piss­ing them­selves laugh­ing at the idea that hey, this silly cow stud­ied Web Devel­op­ment with the OU for two and some-odd years and this is the best she can do?

For­tu­nately, I didn’t have to pon­der for too long as you can now ask to see the reviews that your site received prior to being accepted/rejected.

Most were great. One wasn’t so great, instead it was uncom­fort­ably picky. Like in the same way that you wake up one morn­ing with bad skin and then some delight­fully “help­ful” per­son takes it upon them­selves to point out to you, rather pub­licly, the exact co-ordinates of the huge blem­ish, which of course is now lit­er­ally swinging from you face due to its sheer weight and is nigh on the verge of explo­sion. You appre­ci­ate the sen­ti­ment behind the mes­sage, but at the same time, you knew about it and were just try­ing your best to ignore the prob­lem in the hopes that it would just go away on its own.

The high level of ick that was felt when first read­ing the review has been quickly replaced with a drive to simply do bet­ter. I have removed the plu­gin that was caus­ing most of the val­id­a­tion prob­lems, edited most of the “prob­lem” posts (there may be more to fix, going through 100+ posts and ump­teen pages is a time con­sum­ing and thank­less task) and fixed the lay­out so that it doesn’t get squashed to bug­gery at smal­ler resolutions.

The reviews sadly, were without attri­bu­tion, but a genu­ine thank you to whomever it was that said “no” to my applic­a­tion. Truly. Because of you, my site now comes with 17% more bet­ter.