Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

Instablogs Sucks

Posted in Blogging, SEO, Spam by Elliott Back on October 6th, 2005.

I’m mean, so I’ll just say it. InstaBlogs sucks. Darren worries about their content, The Blog Herald notes their poor receival, but let’s take a look at their content. Besides being quite late, they have no content on half their blogs, poor quality content on many of their blogs, numerous spelling mistakes, and very little there altogether.

They have six “business blogs,” Adpunch, Insta Finance, Hello Company, Planet Outsourcing, VoIP Central, and Yourbizourbiz. There are 9 posts so far, an average of 1.3 per blog. The total wordcount is 1078 words, which is approximately 180 words per blog. Of these thousand or so words, .4% of them are spelled incorrectly. So, it seems like they’re understaffed. This one post I’m writing about them is already as big as the entire average contents of one of their business blogs. And why the topics they chose? Seems a little random. In fact, the whole InstaBlogs thing is slipshod–the name should give that away!

Technically, they don’t even try to validate as XHTML, and their javascript is … really crappy. Take a look at this function:

// Function to validate EMail IDs
// Arguments   : 1. mail : Value of the field
//     containing Email or String Constant.
// Return Value: true if date is valid,
//     false otherwise.

function isValidMail(mail)
{
	m=new String(mail);
	var mailLength=m.length
	var totalDOT=0
	var totalROUTE=0
	var totalSPACE=0

	// Should not beging with a '.' or '@'
	if(m.charAt(0)=='@' || m.charAt(0) == '.')
	{ return false; }

	for(ctr=1;ctr< =mailLength;ctr++)
	{	if (m.charAt(ctr)=='@') { totalROUTE++; }
		if (m.charAt(ctr)=='.') { totalDOT++; }
		if (m.charAt(ctr)==' ') { totalSPACE++; }
	}

	if (totalROUTE>1)
	//Checking for Multiple @
	{ return false; }

	if(totalDOT<1)
	//Checking for Route Domain
	{ return false; }

	if(totalSPACE>0)
	//No Embeded Space
	{ return false; }

	//Checking for Invalid Characters
	for(ctr=0;ctr< =mailLength;ctr++){
	if (m.charAt(ctr)=='`')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='!')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)==' ') 	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='#')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='$')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='%')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='^')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='&')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='*')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='(')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)==')')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='+')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='=')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='|')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='\\')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='{')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='}')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='[')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)==']')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)==':')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)==';')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='"')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=="'")	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='<')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='>')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)==',')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='?')	return false;
	else if (m.charAt(ctr)=='/')	return false;
	}

	return true;
}

Not only is this not valid, but it makes you wonder who in 2005 still hasn’t heard about regular expressions?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2005 at 9:57 pm and is tagged with hello company, lt 1, receival, spelling mistakes, space return, wordcount, charat, embeded, mail, insta, quality content, instablogs, poor quality, worries, email, finance, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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