The invasion of tweens and teens

The other day when I was bloghopping, I came upon this site, which features the top 100 youngest bloggers of the world. I’m not talking about 14-year olds who have a small personal site on Blogger, but informative niche blogs with hundreds of subscribers. When I think of informative niche blogs, I think of sites like Smashing Magazine and Six Revision, with articles written by professionals with years of experience, who are actually legal to drink and vote. So you can imagine my surprise when I found out that there were so many niche blogs out there¹ written by kids who have yet to hit puberty.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, I’m not saying that tweens and teens are incompetent as bloggers or web designers, no. I know a couple 18-and-under people whose blog I frequently read and whose designs inspire me, and I’m sure the authors of the above blogs aren’t total twats either.  Heck when I was 14, my designs were mediocre at most and my blog entries were so bad that I can’t even stand re-reading them, so kudos to them for their achievements. But to me, the idea of following the blogging advice of a 12-year old boy²  is almost as ridiculous as taking relationship advice from my 13-year old male cousin. All I can think is, do they really know what they’re talking about? Maybe they do, but surely I can get more credible advice from someone who is older and more experienced, no?

It’s just like those tween/teen-run hosting sites that offer “unlimited” space and bandwidth all for $1/year³. Yeah it’s cheap and yeah you get everything those $5/month hosts offer, but is it reliable? I know I’d rather spend that extra $59/year to have a product that I know won’t screw me over without warning⁴. With informative blogs though, everything is free, so between the blog written by a 14-year old kid and one by a 30-year old web designer, wouldn’t you rather read and follow the advice of the latter? I’m not discriminating on age, but rather, on experience, and unfortunately, that’s something that can only be accumulated with time. To the tweens and teens running those blogs, give yourself a pat on the back, but you’ve still got a long way to go.

What do you all think of the emerging trend (or what I call invasion) of the tweens and teens outside of circle of personal blogs (aka. hosting sites, niche blogs, etc)?

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Transparent background and opaque text

On a totally off-topic-to-the-title note:

1. My new theme is done and up (I like to state the obvious), and many thanks to Lani who let me use her adorable Pokemon artwork in my designs!
2. UMD kicked Duke’s ass in basketball tonight, 79-72! Sorry Duke fans, but Terps > Blue Devils. ALWAYS.
3. It’s almost Friday!

These things made my otherwise miserably long and omg-I-want-to-kill-myself week somewhat more tolerable. Again, let me know if you find bugs or errors of any sort with this theme. I wouldn’t be surprised if you did, since it was design + coded on a semi-functional brain that was in desperate need of sleep. Anyways, back on topic.

I haven’t done any tutorials/tips in a while, and as I was designing this new theme, I learned something I want to share with you all. With the arrival of CSS3, there are now so many things you can do with your designs without having to rely on images. One of these things is the opacity function. You can apply this property to pretty much any CSS selector: image, div, h2, etc. by using:
div { opacity: 0.5; }
This would give you a div with an opacity of 50%.
(But wait, there is more! Read on…)

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Get your password while it’s hot

I’ve decided to use the old theme for now since my other theme was causing some problems (more on that next time…maybe), so bear with me as I work on another less controversial theme. I have several post ideas in mind, but with midterms coming up (and now the rush for a new theme in the midst of all this fiasco), I won’t be able to write them anytime soon.

Anyways, the main point of this post is to announce that I’ll be password protecting some of my more personal posts from now on. I had intended for this blog to be a mainly online friends thing, where no one I knew in real life would be reading it (since I’ve said some pretty obscene things about people in the past), and it’s sometimes frustrating that I can’t write about certain things for the fear that offline people might *stumble* across it.

So…password protected posts! I promise I’ll try to keep those at a minimum, but if you’re interested in reading those, just let me know in the comment section, and I’ll email you the password. Which would be more convenient for you as the readers? Registering at my blog and logging in to view the private posts, or me sending you a password? Let me know

Now back to designing a new layout…

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