If You Wrote Without a Filter, Who Would YOU Sound Like?

“This is exactly like that time that that German princess tried to steal my look and we had to get the king and Hitler involved except this is way worse because we’re both Americans, Morgan Freeman.  We’re on the same team, Morgan Freeman. And this hurts way more than the princess thing because I thought we had something special.  Remember?  Nine years ago at the Houston airport when I got lost and so did you and we both turned around at the same time and almost ran into each other and you gave me this look like “Hi.  I’m Morgan Freeman and I’m lost too.  We’re in this together, my friend.  Fight the good fight, little ninja” and then we totally had this moment that one of us never forgot that and it stayed in her heart as a special little bond until YOU TOTALLY F****D ME?  And yes, I realize that I might be overreacting but it doesn’t change the hurt, Morgan Freeman.  It’s lingering.  And painful.  All that goodwill you built up?  Gone. I can’t even watch any Morgan Freeman movies anymore.  Or movies narrated by you.  Which is pretty much every movie ever made.  Awesome.  Now I never get to go to the movies again.  Nice job, Morgan Freeman.  You just ruined the entire film industry.”

Who would YOU most resemble if you cut out all filters and just wrote what comes to mind? For me, it’s The Bloggess. Where emo and wit go to mingle and make furry little flesh-eating babies. Yes, she’s crass. Yes, she’s irreverent. Yes, she writes things I don’t agree with. But she makes me chuckle like no other blogger I’ve ever read.

You learn a lot about yourself when you realize that the one blogger you absolutely enjoy more than any other does everything you don’t. I’m cautious and careful. With my ORM background, I’m thinking about 5-10 years down the road when I’m known more for ministry than for commerce. Even though I have some pointed and occasionally sacrilegious opinions, I don’t want to build a name for myself upon that persona. I expect that I will continue trending toward a more healthy and healed perspective. And the voice I use today will affect people I’m trying to reach tomorrow.

But I can’t escape one simple fact: I’ll forgive almost anything if you make me laugh.

The site’s design isn’t so special. It’s simple, approachable, and most importantly, the sidebar and ads don’t distract from reading the actual copy. Whether it’s Q&A or convos with Victor, you just don’t want to miss a single thing she says.

Most blogs I crush on will be more due to their look and feel than their content (because there aren’t THAT many blogs with killer content). Not here. Check out these posts and you’ll see what I mean:

UPDATED! An open letter to the King of Germany

You brought this on yourself, Morgan Freeman

An open letter to the people sitting next to me at the movie theater

What she does well

Humor. Wit. Pairing the oddest descriptors together to form the perfect mind-bending mental image.

Unadorned. I like to think of The Bloggess as the anti-Dooce. She’s not fixing her hair and trying to impress you with her catalog-finish family round the clock. I’m not sure I believe she hasn’t embellished some of the conversations with her husband (they’re just TOO funny sometimes to be real). But I don’t care. Unlike some (God forbid), I don’t come to The Bloggess looking for advice or life lessons. I’m looking for a laugh. And that’s exactly what I get… 92.35% of the time.

Publicly Battles William Shatner. Who else takes on Captain Kirk like a sassy, territorial she-goat?

Needs improvement

Titles. Too long winded and too small a font. Her titles are often entire sentences. I get it – that’s why the font is smaller. It has to be to fit the sentence-long title. But it makes it harder to scroll down from one post to another. Typically, the size of the title font is the indicator that I’ve finished scrolling from one post to the next (assuming the blog shows the entire post on the homepage rather than the preferable excerpt).

URL Structure. All of her posts’ URL structure looks like this -> http://thebloggess.com/?p=4577

This is an SEO no-no. It’s a waste of an opportunity. If you simply turn your post title into the URL (WordPress custom structure /%postname%/), you solve this problem. Or you can customize each URL to something like http://www.dailyblogcrush.com/thebloggess-blog-review – this may not be my title, but it gives a an optimized view the post’s content.

Sex Talk. You won’t see me retweeting 95% of her content, simply because I don’t endorse EVERYTHING she says, especially in regards to sex. But she still makes me laugh harder than any other blogger I’ve run across, and that has to count for something.

Level of Crush

4.5 of 5

***Note: As you can see in the image above, the site isn’t styled for a large screen monitor like I use. If you view the site with a laptop, you won’t see the white background section to the left.