The guy

First, let’s talk about Rarst himselft. No, I am not reviewing his personality, but I can still drop a few words about how he is a good guy. He is an early adopter of frogstr.com and went through all the changes frogstr went through. That’s why you might hear him say this design is not frogstr 2.0, but more something like frogstr 3.75.  His real name is Andrey Savchenko and just like his blog’s tagline suggests, the guy is a bit cynical and has a very particular sense of humor. He his not trying to be someone else, sticks to his personality/what he is and I guess that’s why I also read him.

The blog in general

Now time to cover the blog. First of all, Rarst blogs about softwares, web and tech in general. He reviews software, but also talks about anything he feels like covering that is related to softwares, blogging, web or technology. I personally like that as software/tech websites are sometimes very formal and I love to hear people’s opinion.

I don’t remember Rarst.net using a different theme than the one he his using right now. This is not a bad thing as the theme has been optimized and tweaked a lot over the past months.

One of the thing I like about his blog is that it is using “previews” of posts and not full posts. Why do I like that while my blog has full posts on the front page? Well, I think it is appropriate for a tech blog. It is easy to just scroll down and find something that interests you without you having to read all his cynical thoughts. He also posts very regularly and has a lot of content so I think having a full feed on the front page wouldn’t be a good idea.

I just feel like mentioning he has a “Random” feature on his blog that redirects you to a random post. Great feature and I thought about implementing such feature on frogstr when I saw it.

RSS Icon

Now, Rarst might argue that I am changing my blog theme too often and making too many changes all the time to my layout, but I can tell you he probably changed his RSS Feed icon like a hundred times. You see, he’s so sick of changing his feed icon that he now use a random image! You’ll see a different image if you reload the page. OK, I really don’t mind, I just felt like throwing something back at him.

To be honest, he his the RSS subscribers king so I won’t argue too much. There is a lot we can learn from his RSS branding.

Getting into social networks

After saying for too long he wasn’t that much of a social person, Rarst finally decided to get into social networks like twitter and has a small social network strategy. I can tell you I feel the difference since he started that social network strategy. I don’t know about his traffic, but I see more comments on the posts that I used to see before which is a good thing. I don’t know if it’s because of me and all the kicks in the butt I gave him to get a small social strategy, but whatever the reason is, I think it’s working great. If you guys don’t follow him on twitter, he’s a great resource to follow. Not too many tweets on what he had for dinners and a lot of useful tweets.

Anything I don’t like?

Is there anything I don’t like about Rarst.net? Honestly, just the logo I think. Rarst branding is the big “R”. You’ve probably seen that big “R” on this blog before because he uses it as his gravatar and he has to keep that because that’s his brand. Being consistent with logo and everything is key to branding and I think Rarst understands that. What I am suggesting for the website is a different logo without the “www” in front of rarst, that would make it look better in my opinion. Whatever logo change he makes, it’s still possible to focus on the big “R” and keep using that for branding. That’s just a thought.

The design of the theme is very classic. Looks like it’s been working well for him and it also goes very well with his personality. But you know, I think putting some colors here and there so that the website sticks in our head wouldn’t be too bad of an idea. That would go very well with a logo change.

Formal reviews

One thing I once suggested to Rarst was to do more “formal reviews”. Something with a rating from 0 to 5 on different features at the end of each post so that we can know how he rates softwares and what he really thinks. He answered me something that having non-formal reviews is what sets him apart from the competition: cynical thoughts on softwares. I never really considered that when I asked the question the first time and I have to agree with him: he’s doing things differently and that’s the way to go. I still think there’s something that could be done to make reviews more “formal”, just to receive more Stumble Upon love and things like that and still bring the cynical thoughts in those reviews. Again, just a thought and I don’t have any concrete ways of doing it right now.

That’s it

There you go, so honestly if you like software and web, you have to subscribe to www.rarst.net and also follow Rarst on twitter. Hope you enjoyed and drop comments!