The blogs that definitely did not attract my attention were Bookslut, Emerging Writer's Network, Literary Saloon, Literary Kicks, a Commonplace Blog, and 3 Quarks Daily. These blogs were not pretty and I was bored within seconds of opening up the page. Honestly, they look like websites from the early 2000s. I mean there was nothing wrong with websites looking like that in the early 2000s, but come on, the internet has existed long enough for it to be easy for any old blogger to beautify their blog. Heck, it doesn't even need to be beautiful, it just needs to look neat, which not all of these blogs do. Some of them are even cluttered with ads, which is a big mistake. The fact that these blogs look so ugly turns me away from even wanting to read them. And I'm sure the content in these blogs is great...if I could manage to stay on the website long enough to read the actual blog posts.
Literary Minded and The Elegant Variation looked nice enough to be presentable. They looked like blogs and all the posts were easily accessible. However, they looked kind of boring, which made me kind of bored, so I stopped reading the blog posts. Again, I'm sure they're great blog posts, but I was too bored to really see if they were. One thing I really liked about these blogs was that they were both written in the first person, which I expected of most blogs, but weirdly, some were not written in first person. A blog is very personal, and when it's not in first person, it feels more like an article, rather than a blog post. Of all the blogs, these two were definitely the ones that felt the most like actual blogs that actual people would have, which I liked a lot.
Maud Newton and Andrew Rickard were just like the last two, and then some. The topics of the blog posts were more interesting, and they layouts were still simple, but a bit different, so they caught my eye. I enjoyed these blogs thoroughly, and they were very similar to Literary Minded and The Elegant Variation, but these felt a bit more hipster, for lack of a better work.
I loved they layout of Reluctant Habits, and it caught my eye immediately. After trying to get to some posts, however, I got confused and gave up. I guess they were all mp3 files, and the transcripts of them, but I didn't really know what that meant. Is it actually a podcast instead of a written blog?
The Guardian and The Millions were too much like news websites, and as soon as I opened up the page, I started looking for "articles" in the same way I'd look for articles on a news website. It didn't feel like a blog at all, and I don't know if it was run by just one person, but it didn't seem like it was.
Dani Shapiro was simple, but I really enjoyed the style of the author's writing. The things she wrote about seemed more personal than the topics of the other blogs, as well. This was one of the only blogs that I actually went through and read thoroughly. The writing was really beautiful, and I'm not even sure why it's considered a literary blog, because she mostly writes about herself. Even though she's a writer, her blog posts aren't about other writing, they're about her life as a writer. (Fun Fact: Dani Shapiro wrote a blog post for The Millions.)
GalleyCat was one of my favorites, even though it's more about the book publishing industry, rather than just a straight up literary blog. The articles were very different from the other blogs, and the layout was gorgeous.
Overall, what keeps me reading a blog is when it's (1) neat and nice looking, (2) written in first person, and (3) interesting, content wise, after a thirty second skim of the most recent post.
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