Month: January 1970

I read the first post on this site and immediately thought one thing – scandalous! The author, whose name we never learn, believes that he is gay. What’s the problem? He doesn’t feel as if he can tell anyone and can only live his gay lifestyle online. What’s this mean? Those of us that stumble upon his weblog, called “1Body2Souls – A Gay Confession”, are reading top-secret information that is not even known to the author’s friends and family.

The first thing I wanted to read was an about section – a link to a profile somewhere or just a couple of words about the person sitting at the keyboard when this site is updated. Unfortunately, I could not find that anywhere. Instead, I did what any obsessive blog reader would do – I jumped to the very first post, which took place just about two months ago. The beginning is a great place to start for this weblog; it gives readers the general idea of why this weblog is such a personal avenue for the author.

We learn through reading that the author is from India, where homosexuality is extremely frowned upon. Visitors to this site read about the vicissitudes of developing crushes on guys and being unable to do anything at all about his feelings. We read about the things he must sacrifice and the decisions he must make between being accepted by his peers or being gay. Reading the posts, it’s very evident that this battle is an extremely situation for him to handle. The author seems to be trying everything he can to pull himself away from the gay lifestyle that he feels like he really should be a part of.

The layout for the site is, with no surprise since it’s hosted by Blog*spot, a standard Blogger template. It uses a dark gray text on a white background, which makes the site easy to read. The two-column layout has the main blog posts in the bigger column, followed by the typical blogger fodder in the sidebar – archives, links, buttons, and statistical information about visitors. The author intermittently posts pictures of half-naked attractive men, which breaks up the monotony of the text.

More frequent than not, the posts are difficult to read. Perhaps due to living in India, the grammar and spelling in the posts is almost to the level of being atrocious. The spelling errors are things that can be easily corrected by running a spell-check in any word-processing program. It’s bad enough that it distracts from the writing a great deal.

The author has himself in a very difficult predicament. Does he enable himself to live a lifestyle that feels natural, or does he abandon his soul and feelings and feel trapped being someone he’s really not? Reading this weblog is the only way you’ll find out.

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After reading the first two months of archives on this site, I was honestly lost. The only thing that kept me coming back for me would have to be the amazing photography that fills a good number of posts on this site.

Bob’s BarnaBlog is hosted by Blogger, and uses one of the fine packaged Blogger templates. There’s some sort of issue with the alignment, though. With this standard two-column layout, I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the main column’s content before I can see what type of information is housed in the sidebar.

The posts come very frequently, often with multiple posts in one day. That aspect does give readers a reason to continue visiting this site.

After the first few months of blogging, the author finally decides to stray from the regular posts of sharing photos and artwork. In these entries, it’s hard to dictate if it’s the writer actually posting about the day’s events or a story from the past, or if it’s a work of fiction the author just wants to publish somewhere. There’s not a place to learn anything about the author of this site, which only leads us to speculate who is writing everything that’s being published here.

The writing style of the site is hard to pin to one style. It’s a thick writing style that I find hard to chew through if you’re just looking for a casual weblog to read from time to time. The substance is what I would call profound, but it’s hard to decipher exactly what is being written.

In an April 2005 post, the “members of the bob’sbarnablog editorial team” are wondering why they don’t have much of a readership of their weblog. The lack of clarification and the downright confusing posts would be my explanation to that conundrum.
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I waited for two weeks for more entries to show up on this site in hopes of having a little more substance to review. Unfortunately, that never transpired.

The site, called The Washington Wizards Report, is obviously a report on the NBA’s Washington Wizards. There are three posts on the site, and a fourth that only seems to be a test post when the site was first set up.

For a site that’s supposed to be about the Washington Wizards, only 1/3 of the site actually pertains to them. The posts cover other Washington D.C. sports teams, too – the NFL’s Redskins and MLB’s Nationals.

The design is simple. It’s black text on a white background, with some dark blue bordering the complete layout. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a template of some sort.

The posts each have a byline, which gives off the appearance that the text was copied straight from a newspaper’s website. Reading through the articles, I feel like I’m reading the sports section of my local newspaper. There’s no author information anywhere, so readers could very well be reading the weblog of a high-profile sportswriter… or just someone who’s copying and pasting from ESPN.com. Either way, the lack of archives make it easy to stop reading this site and not even think twice about it.
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A weblog mostly, though not entirely, about graphic design, A Word in Your Ear is strikingly simplistic at first glance. The initial attention grabber is the large banner at the top of the page. The red banner features what appears to be a 3-dimensional button with the name of the weblog and a catchy tagline written just under the button.

The posts typically revolve around the visual design industry or concepts of design. The author does occasionally deviate from this pattern to discuss his personal life as well. In these much less common posts, we are able to get a deeper view of the author and enjoy a bit more of his personality.

The layout of the site uses a basic Blogger template with a few extras. In addition to the aforementioned banner, the site has extensive archives as well as links to books written by the author of the weblog. To facilitate the discussion of concepts, the author has also posted links to significant post from the past.

This page is probably of great interest to those involved in graphic design, but there is little to attract or maintain the attention of any others. However, even though the posts are geared toward a specific audience, both the style of writing and set-up of the site itself are deserving of praise.NULL

Let me start off by saying that this site is amazing! Riri is the author and she has done an excellent job of catching your interest from first glance with her creative and stylish template. I loved the way she listed an index of links to different pages on her blog. Once you click on the link to her “about me”, you instantly get a bird’s eye view of who this blogger really is. She gives you four photos that pretty much lay out who she is, a programmer, a mother, a wife, and a quirky, fantastic human being.

After I got over the initial euphoria I checked out the posts on Riri’s blog. Each post, though some might seem like ordinary ramblings, offered more insight to the author. Riri has the ability to make even the ordinary seem magnificent. I checked out some of the archives and was amazed each time I clicked on a different post. Riri can be funny yet still manage to come off nothing short as inspiring.

There are a lot of extras on this blog from the links across top of the page that will take you to her photo blog where you can see her amazing photography talent, to the ‘random entry’ link that takes you to a random post on her site. She also breaks down her entries into categories along the left-hand side of the page which makes it easy to navigate your way through her thoughts. I especially liked the Riri quiz which tests you on how well you think you might know her…I must make a mental note to try my hand at this once I’ve consumed a few more of her posts.

I gave this site a rating of 5 because I honestly think it’s one of the best blogs I’ve seen around due to it’s format and content. Riri has made it to my own blogroll where I’ll be visiting her daily.

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