I was feeling pretty good this morning, so I thought I’d risk life and limb today and review the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. According to Google Analytics, they have 6,380,170 hits as of this post.

Style:
Love it or hate it, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has a distinct style. Strongly black and red, with content in white columns, it incorporates a fluid three column layout on the home page, with two columns on interior pages. While the content columns float free of a containing background in a manner that I criticized Argghhh! for in my last review, it works here. The solid background and fluid layout act as the container, giving it the grounded look I thought was needed at Argghhh!.

The use of color is well done, with a strong black background and red used liberally as an accent. (The only liberal aspect you’re likely to find on this site.) Gray blockquotes with red outlines nicely compliment this simple color scheme. The links are blue, which manages to be clearly visible without being overpowering.

Graphics are well done in a very unified theme.

Structure:
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler is a WordPress site with an entirely CSS layout. The site structure is well done and should be represented well in any modern browser. Load time is high with 48.94 seconds on DSL or 157.08 seconds on 56K modem. This is quite high by blog standards and should be improved upon. A lot of the load time is caused by the high number of images. There were 72 images on the homepage when I tested it.

The CSS is well thought out and complete, though it could use a little clean up work. It has a some non-standard coding that should be fixed or removed.

While the site structure is good, the WordPress theme could use some minor updates. A quick validation check of the home page shows no true errors, but 442 warnings. Most of them are insignificant, but should be easy to fix too. A site with this level of traffic should really have this fixed. Most of them seem to be minor bits of extraneous code which could be easily removed from the base PHP of the theme. There is also some misuse of the CSS element ID which should be fixed. The ID element is used to describe a unique element which can occur once on a page, but is being used multiple times here.

While most if not all of the questionable code I’m seeing is not in the posts themselves, I’m concerned that it may affect RSS feeds and possibly the long term stability of the site. Without correction, what should be minor changes to the CSS or PHP could have much more dramatic effects than intended. The theme’s PHP and CSS should be carefully checked and cleaned of offending and extraneous bits.

Content:
It is politically off the charts to the right and pulls no punches. The authors’ vocabulary of obscene and profane language is vast and well used. This site doesn’t tolerate idiots of any stripe. While its authors will openly mock and ridicule anyone they feel is less than honest or sincere about their beliefs and/or politics, they are reasonably tolerant of polite disagreement. That said, their commenters are not always so polite.

What would I change:
I’d update the PHP to remove extraneous code.

I’d lower the number of images and optimize their use in an effort to decrease load time. Some improvement should be possible with little or no effect on the overall style.

I’d make minor changes to the CSS to make it more closely meet modern standards.

I’d add High Desert Wanderer to the blogroll, because… it appears to be tragically missing.

Summary:
While the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has a very distinct style, minor changes should be made to images, CSS and PHP in order improve load time and to make it more closely meet modern web standards.

As I said before, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has a distinct style. By intention or accident, a unique and very marketable brand has been created here. Great care should be taken to maintain this style while improvements are being made.