The Weblog Review

I thought the title referred to the city Victoria. My guess was the author lived there. But no. Perhaps then it was about the queen. Ok, not just about Queen Victoria but about monarchy? The answer is once more no. Maybe, just maybe, it would be an ordinary journal written by someone extraordinary. Guess what? No again.

The coolest thing about the blog is that you can pick the design. There are 9 design options — or rather skins, as the author calls them. They’re all very feminine, up to please someone with a girlie taste (unfortunately it so happens not to be my case). They all work just fine, concerning font size and organization. The posts are organized in 10 categories, although the great majority goes under the title “General”, which doesn’t say much, does it?.

There are many huge posts, a lot of them consisting of lists. I became a great fan of lists after I’ve “read-the-book-and-seen-the-movie” “High Fidelity”. In both the movie and the book, the characters are obsessed in making lists of top 5 anything. But you just have to read this blog to understand what taking an obsession too far means. I’ve found a list with over a hundred items. By the way, there are HUGE posts. I mean it. Capital letters so you can understand perfectly what I mean.

After reading, or rather skimming, the blog, I was perfectly clear that Always Victoria could be turned into a book. I’d suggest “All the self-help, supposedly inspiring texts you’ve never read because they happen to crash into your e-mail box in Power Point files”. And you are not into Power Point files with that kind of message, especially if they have animation and mid files. Most of the posts are about friendship and spiritual issues but all presented in a quite, hm, how do I put it into words?, cheesy way. Maybe I’m being hard on the author, who by the way signs as “Sweet N Sassy”, but I’m supposed to be honest here. Or at least the editor told me so.

This is so not my kind of reading. The author does comment on some of the texts she (supposing this is a she, considering you can’t find any further information) pastes into her blog, I’ll give you that. I guess I’d have to say it’s not all about cheesy messages after all. It’s about cheesy, supposedly inspiring messages, anotated by the author. My guess is it’s going to turned into a book and will be in the list of best sellers sometime.
Always Victoria

Glimpsing at the title of this blog and waiting for it to load, I thought maybe I’d be coming across a personal blog, written by a female, in letter form about their life. It’s not far from what you actually get from Victoria’s blog. She doesn’t have an about me page, but going through her archives you find that she has a list of 200 things, she talks about herself and the way she’s got her categories set up makes it easy to click on the “about me” category she has listed to get some more info.

I believe that this blog holds a bit of everything. Inspiration, light hearted banter, poems & quotes. For the lack of specific information about the author herself, she makes up for it with the content in her blog. Some things she writes are personal, other’s are very general, but still make you think & reflect.

Always Victoria is definitely a blog that pulls you in and warms your heart. The design of the blog isn’t too shabby either! Apart from the pin striped background, I really enjoyed the various skins. They gave character and added to the whole experience that is Always Victoria.

Briefly, all her links worked, I loved the fact that she had archives listed as well as categories, she’s a woman after my own heart. It makes viewing easier and finding particulars even easier.

Overall, I gave Always Victoria a 4.25 only because I couldn’t find anything that was unique to the author on there. The blog is very well written and enjoyable to read, some of the entry’s I did skim because they didn’t appeal to me, but kudos to the author for making it a blog that has so far kept my interest levels above bored!Always Victoria

From the title, I thought I would be coming across a blog about living out on a farm somewhere. What you do get instead is a dark pink blogger background and a light pink blog main column where the text is. Usually, I quite like pink, but this is screaming so much pink that I’m now seeing pink tinges on my white screen.

The blog itself is about a woman, Magz, who doesn’t have much info about herself on her profile page although if you do read more than a few of her posts you will see her personality start to come through her writing. You can also find pictures scattered throughout the blog of herself, her son and various other people as well as shots of the sky. Magz writes about various personal experiences and events.

The reason that I gave this blog a 2, well apart from pinkifying my corneas, is because Magz’ writing is entertaining, but hard to read as she doesn’t break up her paragraphs or sentences. Instead she uses the … quite a bit, which I find irritating as well as hard to follow.

Overall though, I’d defiantly recommend this blog to anyone who might want to know how long it takes to get cable installed in South Arizona and something along the lines of “end up loster then ole Ponce de Leon”. I have no idea what that means, but I’m guessing that it’s probably similar to our “Drier than a dead dingo’s donger”.

maggiez farm

My first impression of this site was how vibrant the colors were, and how touching the sidebar photo was. I thought this site was going to be dedicated to individuals with breast cancer, due to the sidebar link inviting visitors to donate to this worthy cause.

But I was mistaken. I lurched through a horrifically descriptive paragraph including memorable quotes such as “One can only hope that it’ll all come out because it’s sure gurgling and moving, and pinching, and spasming and the whole bowel show” Oh My Goodness. I was alarmed, but intrigued, and continued on, expecting to find more lurid details of her personal life.

However, as I read on, I became increasingly touched with this woman’s life. Her insight into her marriage, her family, and herself is gentle, yet still open and honest. She has a solid base in blogging techniques, cleverly linking you to Christmas Carols by clicking on a record cover, or a flash presentation of family photos. Heading through the archives, I found that she also has hosted a number of photobloggers on her site, and her blog is packed with her personal photography successes as well. She is an amazing photographer, and gives you an intimate view into her inner eye & private life.

The design of her weblog is just right. While the colors are a bit of a strange pick, they do nothing to detract from the overall layout of her blog. She cleverly inserts comics, photos and links to give a visual & mental break to her entries. On the whole, the layout is clean, and pleasing to the eye.

All of these extra features truly add to the quality of this blog. I love the little perks like “The Riri Quiz” where you show how well you know her, based on answering questions pertaining to information inside of her blog.

I highly recommend visiting this blog. I found that I felt connected to this woman, through cyberspace, and that is a rare thing. Enjoy her intelligence, her photography & her take on life.Riri’s Brain Dump

Let me warn you when you first click this link that you’re not going to be greeted with a blog, but rather with an RSS feed. This was a bit distracting at first as I didn’t think to check the URL type when I first clicked. However, it’s very easy to get to the blog itself by removing the “/atom.xml” from the URL. But alas! This points us to a directory rather than a blog. This review isn’t starting so good as I have to find the “blog.html” file to actually start looking at the blog.

The design is very basic, a Blogger standard, and one of my least favorites. However, I don’t see it ten times a day, and I guess that may be why this is the theme that was chosen. It’s simple grey and white with nothing much beyond the basic Blogger plugins (archives, profile area, etc.). If you scroll down all the way you can see there are a few “Sponsor Links” the author has added, but beyond that there isn’t really much.

Let’s begin on the content of this site. As the title suggests, it’s mostly targeted to those who are interested in web hosting. The posts are littered with links and not that interesting to me, since I have absolutely no interest in changing webhosts right now. Probably ninety percent of the people who already have blogs know everything that this blog has to offer. A lot of the posts are shorter, and don’t really grab any interest. It felt like I was reading notes from a computer sciences class.

If you don’t know a lot about hosting, computers, and what have you and would like a way to learn some of the basics, this blog might catch your interest. For the average reader, however, there’s just not enough to keep people coming back for more.NULL