Month: January 1970

So a name of Insani-Tea Blog has to be about Tea right? I mean what else could it be about? For fun I threw the word Tea into the dictionary on my computer and the last definition was “Another name for marijuana”. Maybe, just maybe it is about pot, but I hardly doubt it.

Oh I was right it is about tea. How to make it, different kinds of tea, different gadgets for helping brew tea, and well anything and everything without tea. The posts are well written and sometimes seem to ramble a bit, but are enjoyable to read. I would have to say it is like a good glass of iced tea on a hot day. Nice and easy without too much stress.

The blog is hosted on blogspot which isn’t always a plus. It also uses a blogspot template, but oh well. The posts are few and far between which is kind of a let down. The blog started off strong, but now the posts are about once a month, maybe twice.

A blog with this specific of a topic has to be great. It cannot just be good. Unfortunately this blog is just good. The infrequent posts by the author make it hard to enjoy and almost discourage checking the site out. The information however is golden and is well worth reading. I wish I could say more about this blog, but all 25 posts are just a quick read, and that’s how this review will be.
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OK, so what have we got here, huh? “Falling through the World”. Some travel blog I suppose, may turn out to be interesting. But, what’s this? http://peopleremember.blogspot.com/ address… “Blogspot.com” address – no money invested – less professional blog? Let’s not cross it at the beginning, just because it has got an ordinary address (not connected with the blog’s title too).

So, the blog loads quickly and what can we see? A blogger template! Oops, it doesn’t make a good impression. At least there are pictures added to some of the posts. But, except a photo of the author, no more graffics involved in the design.

Well, let’s take a closer look at the blog’s content itself then. We can choose from the main page and… that’s all. No ‘about me’ page. Not good. All we have is a sidebar with some links, archives and adsense ads, not even and RSS Feed button… awesome, you may get lost.

But, let’s focus on the real deal, the essence of every weblog – the posts. The author, Mike Danger Bain, tends to write a lot. This means at least twice a week and rather lenghty posts. However, I wouldn’t call his blog a ‘travel’ blog, ash he suggests in a subtitle. It is a personal, very personal and just personal weblog. Good or bad – it depends on what you are looking for. Anyway, the content is about his work, his friends, some thoughts – simply everyday life. The style is… ordinary. Of course, he doesn’t make grammar mistakes (although some spelling errors do occur). The style is not bad, but also not brilliant. Just normal. It doesn’t make me throw up, but also doesn’t engage me too much, make me can’t stop reading.

As you may expect, there are not many additional features of the blog. It looks like the author was running a kind of foundation, raising funds for his backpacking travels, ‘Sponsor A Backpacker’ it is called. Interesting – it has a dot-com address, while the blog itself doesn’t. It wasn’t very successful so far – it didn’t raise more than 15 pounds. No more bonus features.

Well, time to finish. I am afraid I can’t give you a good mark, mister Mike. Your site just looks… poor. And lacks in any content apart from the posts. However, I respect you for writing so much (without having big readership), I recommend you to do some work on the blogs design, some more advertisement and wish you good luck!
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I am not the intended audience for this blog. I am not someone who views herself as “progressive,” and I feel the term in and of itself is rather cliché anymore. But I did enjoy the Progressive Wednesday blog for a lot of reasons. Let me tell you why.

Founders Eric and Matt have put together a website filled with “to-do’s, talk, and tools to get America over the hump.” I’m presuming the “hump” is the Bush Administration, viewed by many to be the long-doldrummy Wednesday of our collective soul.

Each Wednesday they have a feature article. These articles encompass Coral Reef Endangerment, Wind Power, Porn, Wal-Mart and their efforts to take over the planet, Darfur, The Fast Food Nation, Niagara Falls, and many other topics that the editors feel need our attention. Each Wednesday article is succinct, focuses on a topic, and lists ways you as the reader can make a difference. The Wednesday articles are not the only content on the site. Every day someone from their volunteer team is contributing an article into the blog on topics ranging from Family to Religion. They have an active staff of people spanning many different decades in age, but each person is passionate about their shared and individual philosophies.

The site is constantly updated. It is great to read a blog that I had to actually spend time with in order to formulate an opinion on in order to review. The archives go back to February, 2007 and there is a lot of content to read through. So often we receive sites at TWR to review that have six entries. I have to take a second and thank Progressive Wednesday for having more than a spattering of entries upon which to write a review (tips hat in thanks towards the staff).

I enjoy that the staff, while all different people with different philosophies and backgrounds, all seem to be pointing in the same direction. A lot of times I read a community or group blog and I wonder… what is the cohesive thread that MAKES this a group blog? This group is a team and not just a random assemblage of people who feel like writing on the web.

The look and feel of the site is very basic but works very well. The header graphic changes with the Wednesday article and carries through the site for the rest of the week. The navigation makes perfect sense, and their custom logo is really good.

There are a few things I don’t like about the site. The template of the site is bigger than my screen, which is running 1024×768. The right side of the screen is chopped off by about an inch (ie: the magnifying glass of the search box is cut off, the Flickr photo section title says “One Photo Of Ou Beautiful Worl” . It isn’t a BIG problem, but I think it should be massaged to make it so everything fits.

Another thing that I didn’t like which took me some time to figure out is that if I click back on the archive calendar to go back to July, the July page which appears does not have a calendar on it to take me back to June. There are several pages for July’s archive, but even on the first page of the July archive (navigating back using the “Previous Entries” link at the bottom of the pages) shows that it just isn’t there. This surprised me at first, but thanks to the search box, I punched in a few months and was able to find the very first posting in February of 2007 so I could progress forward through the site. Which seemed a lot easier. Plus, I like reading forward in time instead of backward. A consistent monthly calendar would be great, not sure if July’s is the only one missing or not, but found the calendar on other month’s pages like March, so it may just be a code oversight.

Additionally, there were places where links launch a new window but on the same page, no new window is launched. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. And I hate when new windows are launched randomly, for no reason.

On the Columns page, many of the links are incorrectly linked, and launched column sections that didn’t belong to the title (ie: Carey Mack’s pocket links to TGIF movie review. TGIF movie review links to Twin Cities… etc).

The February 28th Wednesday Article on Porn is filled with content errors for the footnote section. Lots of endif statements and supportFootnote statements. I do have to commend them for footnoting in the first place though, seeing as a lot of the blogs I’ve read recently don’t cite anyone or anything, which annoys me to no end. My guess is it is an easy fix, and they can clean up those errors easily.

As I mentioned at first, I am probably not the intended audience for this blog. But, at Progressive Wednesday, I didn’t feel attacked, slighted, insulted or otherwise fingerpointed at by any of the articles I read. I think the writing is honest, and the message is clear. The world is a wonderful place, worth investing effort in, and that individuals can make changes with themselves that make changes in the world. I give Progressive Wednesday a 3.75 and would recommend it to anyone looking to read well-written socially-conscious materials on the web.
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Operadaddy was submitted for review back a few months ago, when the summer was young and our heady optimism that we would get around to reviewing a pantload of blogs was in full swing.

Unfortunately, a few weeks ago Operadaddy posted his last post, and on the webpage it is his ONLY post… so I can’t go back through all of his archives and actually read and review the site.

I have to give the site a 1 rating, with an apology to Operadaddy, because I did read several entries over the summer and had full intentions of actually reviewing the site. But now I cannot. And I lament for what could have been.

I wish him the best of luck in whatever he does next, and should he reopen the archives and want a re-review, he should drop a line to TWR and we’ll hook him up, I’m sure. NULL

I enjoy travel stories. I like when people tell me tales of interesting places they’ve been that are off the beaten path and not exactly something you’d see in a commercial on TV. One of my favorite series of TV programs ever are the BBC travel documentaries with Michael Palin and his many adventures bopping round the globe on a rather grandiose scale. Documentaries like “Hemingway’s Travels,” “Pole to Pole,” “Sahara” and “Round the World in 80 Days” feature his incredible wit, his open mindedness towards other cultures, and spectacular visuals shot with motion and still cameras.

I watch those programs and own the accompanying BBC published photo book and journals that the Beeb publishes to support the broadcast editions. But I think I’ve found my new Michael Palin. In fact, I bet Michael Palin would be awfully proud of this adventure and this travelogue.

14degrees is the story of Mr. Robert Thomson, a New Zealander living and working in Japan at Asia Pacific University, who decided to embark on a journey around the world. On a bike. And not just any old bike… a recumbent bike. Recumbent bikes are the ones where you’re sitting upright with your legs out in front of you pedaling away.

He outlines his reasoning and his route, he has an FAQ page which mostly deals with the bike itself. He has a flickr generated photo gallery and many videos of his adventures on the road. Primarily, the core of the content of the site exists inside the blog section. The blog begins in February of 2006 with him setting up the planning and purchase of the bike and discussion of whether or not he will need a PDA, and finishing up his work in Japan. He outlines the gear he will be taking along, and sets out on the journey in July of 2006 after training and getting used to the recumbent bike.

For the better part of the blog, he shares photos as often as possible. The first several weeks have very short English updates and long and involved Japanese updates, which disappointed me greatly. That is the only thing I find at fault with the blog… that I have no clue what he’s discussing for that period of time. The photos alone are interesting and kept me moving into the next months, where the English updates are more dominant and the Japanese versions dwindle…

Readers also get to witness his beard grow! He eventually shaves it off, but another Michael Palin reference comes to mind with the long shaggy beard and the “It’s Man” intro to the Monty Python episodes where Palin is a castaway and a hairy wreck. Thomson never looks THAT incredibly wooly, but certainly does farm quite the chin-blanket for several months.

I was most impressed with the stories of his finding places to sleep for free along his journey… abandoned places, monasteries, fields, people’s homes, and how through places like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and other -jans and -stans he manages not only to remain safe, but finds people who are kind, loving, supportive. He finds some nasty bureaucracy and huge flaming hoops of stupid to ride his bike through too as he deals with crossing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but he survives the frustrations and comes out on the other side a man with a bike and some snow to ride through.

Rob shipped his bike home in June and is now using a skateboard to traverse the globe. Take THAT Mr. Palin! As of this writing, Robert is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean heading to the United States of America, where he will take a southerly route across the US and possibly Mexico on his longboard. If successful in his boarding across North America, he claims he’ll be the first person to do so, unassisted. And that’s worthy of a BBC special and a book, with introduction penned by Mr. Palin himself I think.

I am giving this blog a 4.5 rating, the .5 drop is for the stuff I can’t read in Japanese (sorry Robert…) and am greatly looking forward to his USA leg of the journey.

I hope that people here are as kind to him as the people on the steppes of central Asia, and that he finds kindness, care and comfort at the hands of my countrymen. I know sleeping out in the open or in abandoned buildings is not as easy here as it probably was in Eastern Europe, but he’s got Couchsurfing.com as an option and I’m sure he will meet people on the road who will take him in.

I greatly enjoyed reading the blog to this point and cannot wait to see what he has lined up in the US. I wish he was heading to Boston instead of areas south of here… I’d like to shake this man’s hand and offer up a futon for him to sleep on.

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