The Weblog Review

When I saw “Cruise Line Critic” on the list of sites to be reviewed, I jumped right on it. Having been on my first cruise just over a month ago, I can’t get enough of anything cruise related.

The layout of the site could improve. It’s a standard two-column layout, which is easy to navigate as always. The white text on the blue background made my eyes cross a couple of times, but the font size is large enough that I didn’t have to squint when reading. There’s not a lot in the way of extra design-related bells and whistles to talk about – it’s a very straight-forward design. The biggest part of the sidebar? Lists and lists of Google Ads.

Instead of actually being a Cruise Line Critic like the name implies, the creator of this site has just copied and pasted different cruise-related articles from other sources on the ‘net. The articles are very general and vague. A perfect audience for this blog would be people that are somewhat interested in a cruise, but don’t have any idea what to expect or how they work.

The site only rolled out last month, so I’m hoping that over time, the author can put together some more original writing and actually have some critiques about particular cruise lines or cruise destinations. It would fit the name of blog quite a bit better.

Cruises are so popular right now. This blog has the opportunity to really take advantage of it with the type of blog they have. Unfortunately, they failed to do so.
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When you see a title like Mobile Workforce Blog, it’s pretty obvious what you’ll be reading. While it’s not exactly something I go hunting to find when I’m doing a little bit of online reading, I definitely have an interest in the subject. I was excited to see what type of additional input the author(s) of this weblog would have to contribute to the other sites out there just like it.

The site loaded very quickly and it’s layout is very simple. It’s a three-column layout powered by BlogEngine.net, and looks very clean and is very easy to navigate – a bonus with any website at all. The design implements gray text on a white background and includes orange hyperlinks, which is very easy on the eyes.

I wanted to start at the beginning with this weblog, like I do every weblog. According to the list of authors, there should only be about 29 entries to sort through, and if I look at the categories, it shows I should only be reading five entries that fall into the category of hardware. On the other hand, there’s probably at least two dozen different tags that have been assigned to various posts. My point? Navigating through the archives is very confusing and nearly annoying.

I had to scroll through 19 page of archives before I found the beginning. That’s frustrating considering it could have been done with one click had the entries been archived appropriately.

A lot of the technology-based posts are just informational posts, lacking any type of opinion about a particular product. Obviously if I wanted information that essentially could be listed on the product’s box, I’d go to the manufacturer’s website – not this weblog.

I found a post from October 2007 that talks about a company called igroup, and after reading a bit more, I found that igroup is the company that’s sponsoring this blog. There’s even a phone number to a sales team you can call if you have any questions.

This weblog has a lot of information, but it’s definitely not going to make a big splash into the internet waters unless it does something to set itself apart from the other billions of technology-related sites on the ‘net. So far, it hasn’t done it at all.

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Edge of the Blade is a weblog hosted at Blogspot, and looks like a standard every day blog. There’s a black background with orange font in the blog post portion of the design, and white text in the sidebar. The sidebar is full of typical blogger information – brief about section, links, archives, latest movies, and even a still image of his webcam that updates every 45 minutes. There’s an image of a small child jumping to the right of the main posts that stays in the same spot as you scroll up and down. The sidebar turns into a dark maroon, and there’s a picture of David Duchovny directly beneath the author’s description. Yeah, I don’t know either.

The archives go back to March 2005, giving readers a good two and a half years of blog entries to read. Jef, the author, goes from posting just a few times a month to posting nearly daily. His posts tend to deal with things on a personal level – what he’s up to for the weekend, what’s going on in his family life, etc. His writing style is sometimes scattered which is a bit frustrating when reading everything from start to finish. I suppose people that have been reading from the beginning or for quite some time are used to reading this writing style.

It’s impossible to classify this blog under any particular subject. Within fifteen minutes of reading, I had a horrible song from my younger days planted in my head (“Buffalo Stance” by Neneh Cherry) and was prompted to answer a poll on whether or not the Playboy Playmate of the Year should be allowed to have fake boobs. If variety is your thing, this is definitely a place you’ll find it.

I visited this weblog several times in an attempt to sit down and read through the majority of the archives. It’s been around for quite some time and the only fair way to give it an accurate review is to spend a lot of time with it. It was hard for me to stay focused on the entries long enough to get through just a month or two. You can blame that on the content of the weblog itself or my tendency to get easily distracted, but the only way to find out is to check the site out yourself.
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Aside from a randomly placed YouTube video of lions attacking a baby buffalo, fighting over it with an alligator (or maybe a crocodile), and a herd of buffalo going back to rescue the calf that had been attacked, I can’t tell you one other thing I remember from this blog. I’m blaming that on the fact that I have no knowledge and no interest to gain knowledge on the international investment scene, which is this blog’s focus.

Something like this falls into such a specific category that it’s going to be hard-pressed to find random readers that haven’t specifically typed “Dow Jones Industrial Index’s average performance for each calendar month since 1950” into Google with the hopes of finding something like Investment Postcard from Cape
Town.

The author does a very thorough job in explaining each of his posts, and those with more of a finance/investment-related background will no doubt find these entries insightful and quite informative.

Design-wise, it’s hosted through WordPress, so naturally has a standard template provided by WP. The author has added some customized buttons along the sidebar highlighting his “Gold Standard Certification”. Many of the posts included graphs that justify the information in the post, but more often then not, the labels on the graph are too small to read and there’s no way to enlarge the graphs to see more detail.

While I don’t doubt Prieur du Plessis “is one of the most experienced and well-known investment professionals in South Africa”, I don’t think the blog-world is the place for him to be. If he could find some type of South Africa finance related magazine, it’d be a much more suitable market.NULL

Some blogs you have this feeling that you are going to get something completely different than what you expect. With the name of Investment Postcards from Cape Town I for some reason thought it would be more of a vacation home type site. I was wrong.

First thing when I got to the site I noticed was the nice design that was in place. I don’t think it was a template that was modified, but actually a design for this site. It looks too good to just be a template. But I was wrong. So kudos to the author for using a template that works well for his site. The image of the island again gave me the idea that it was going to be vacation homes, but alas I was wrong.

The blog is about investments. Not just a specific type, though gold seems to be the favored item, but all types. There are posts about the Dow, foreign markets, oil prices, and well pretty much everything that I can vaguely remember from my one business econ course from over a decade ago.

The posts are well written which tells me that the author is well educated and well read. Of course he should be well read considering he is posting about investment advice. Some of the posts are just advice from previous things, while others have charts and graphs to explain what is going on.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t understand much of it. What I do know however is that this is how a blog like this should be done. This is done with pure love for his trade. The site isn’t over run with advertisements or quick referral bonuses. No this is about his advice and his knowledge of this business.

Overall I can’t give this blog better than average due to the fact that I hardly understood much of it. I am not in this guys target audience and therefore do not get it. People who are into investing should definitely check this blog out.
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