As I loaded BeingSteve.com into Internet Explorer, the first thing I thought was – Wow, that’s big. There’s a huge logo that greets you. It doesn’t take long to load, but if you’re still using a 800×600 screen resolution, don’t even think about it looking nice. The header image is a 988 x 248. Even at 1024 x 768, I still had to do a little left-to-right scrolling to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything.
The latest post on Being Steve is one of the neatest posts I’ve read in a long time. It was written on Friday, October 14th, 2005, shortly before he left for a weekend away with his girlfriend of two years. The post is the text of an email he’d written to ask her parents if he could marry their daughter. Instead of using the chicken way out, as he put it, he ended up asking them via telephone and has plans to ask her to marry him this weekend. So, hopefully, by the time this review is being read, Steve’s girlfriend will have said yes, he’ll return to blogging as a happily engaged man.
The rest of the blog, while not as lovey-dovey and sickeningly cute as the post I just mentioned, it’s fun to read. The way Steve writes is very conversational. He’s not writing a report on “What I on My Summer Vacationâ€, and he’s not trying to write America’s next great novel either. His posts typically describe his every day life – shopping for things in bulk, comparing nipples with his girlfriend, and his reaction to the “Who Makes Movies?†message they play at the beginning of movies in the theater. Steve has regular gripes just like the rest of it, and the way he writes them out gives many people, I’m sure, a feeling of familiarity with Steve.
Some of the posts are very long, but the majority of them are just the right length – you don’t get tired reading that much, but you feel like Steve really explained what it was he was trying to convey instead of leaving readers stuck with questions.
The color scheme is my biggest complaint about this site. Okay, it’s my only complaint. As I noticed when the site first loaded, the header image is enormous. The background of the site is black, and the font that was chosen is a turquoise-ish Comic Sans. It’s incredibly hard to read, and I often found myself squinting just to finish up a post. The rest of the layout is a typical two-column layout – the weblog portion of the site in a main portion, and a sidebar with the archives, photos, and links on the other.
In short, Steve is just a regular guy, with a regular life, running into the regular problems that anyone else will. That is what makes this blog enjoyable to read.
The site started back in June 2002. No, I didn’t read every post, but if I have bookmarked the site so I don’t miss any of the new posts. Besides, I have to find out what his girlfriend said to his proposal!
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