Month: January 1970

I love sports, and it’s very rare that I stumble upon a really good sports weblog that I want to check one very day. When I saw a site called “Chicago Sports” on the list of sites waiting to be reviewed, I was definitely excited. My excitement soon came to an end when the site loaded with only three posts having been written.

Out of the many Chicago sports teams, the author, listing himself as Pioneertom2, has only written about the Cubs and the Bears so far. The author definitely knows what he’s talking about, and is able to easily justify his opinions on players and teams a like. For a site like this, credibility is a key component and the author unquestionably possesses that.

The layout is a very simple two-column layout. The three entries (two about the Cubs, one about the Bears) are written in black text on a white background. There is no list of archives, because the site doesn’t have any yet. While the design doesn’t add anything to the site, it doesn’t take anything away from it either, which is the main thing.

This Chicago Sports weblog is still in its infancy, but it has the potential to be something big. With so many Chicago sports teams, there’s blogging material year ‘round. Once some time goes by, I think this site will definitely see it’s potential skyrocket. Until the collection of entries grows, though, I’m afraid there’s no much to see here.
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I knew going into this review that it would be focused more at the computer geeks and those of us who have been around the internet for a while. I knew this because the author calls his site a GeekLog and I just had this feeling that it wouldn’t be targeted at other forms of geeks (star wars, star trek, convention going people).

When the page first loaded I was greeted with a post from September. This scared me as I thought I was reviewing a site that hadn’t been updated since then. This post actually serves as a welcome post than anything else. After reading the entire site, I am not sure if this post is warranted to be at the very front. But I will discuss more on that later.

The design of the site is a three column layout with a lot of info on the sidebars. All of the info is your standard blog info; polls, recently posted, things of this nature. When I got to the bottom of the site I noticed that this blog was powered by geeklog. Now I find out that geeklog is actually blogging software and not some creative name for the site. I liked it better when I thought Mr. Maggoo was being creative with the naming of his blog.

The posts are of a technical sort. But they are also of a personal nature. Recent posts talk about a program he has been working on at work that is unfortunately not going to get patented and the process that has been working up to this. Other posts talk about security issues and things going on at the university he works at. The frequency of these posts is not often unfortunately. I wish he would update more often, but I am sure he is busy. I know this site used to have more posts, but a server crash caused the author to lose a lot of posts.

Overall this site is pretty average. With a higher frequency of posts I am sure that this site could blossom. I think Mr Maggoo is trying to figure out where he wants to take his blog and thus his postings are happening less often. There is potential for this site to become a really good read. If this is a goal the author has, then I hope he flexes his blogging muscles and focuses on his blog.

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The first thing I noticed when I got to A Shout in the Dark was the background of the page. There’s an image of a laptop, and the text (that’s directly over the image, with no sort of blogbox to make it easier to read) is white. Typically I’m not too fond of having to highlight text in order to read it.

Once I get to reading the entries, they’re fairly concise. I wouldn’t call them posts so much as articles, however; the author (Charles) seems to take random items of news, tidbits of information, or other facts and strings words together about them. Some have pictures to aid in the visualization of the situation.

The layout, as I mentioned, isn’t very easy to read, and the colors clash a bit. The sidebar is mint green, white, blue, and purple… shades that don’t compliment each other very well. Along with the posts being difficult to read, this is a bit of a setback.

There aren’t many plugins, except for links to different things. Since this is a WordPress blog there are other pages, but they don’t match very well (or, rather, at all) with the blog itself.

This blog just couldn’t catch my interest very well. Between the less-than-user-friendly layout and the posts having little to no consistency as far as relationship goes, I couldn’t really get into this blog at all, and I’m sorry to give it a 1 out of 5.NULL

I didn’t know what a Wogbeast really was when I saw the title of this weblog, but I was very willing to give this site a read to find out. Now, there may be other Wogbeasts out there, but this particular weblog is written by the Disgruntled Wogbeast, or DWB. Thank you, DWB, for providing an acronym.

Readers don’t learn a lot of valid information about DWB. He lives in Wales (which is the United Kingdom, for those of you geographically stupid) and, according to his Blogger profile, he’s a 23-year-old post graduate student.

The first thing I noticed about DWB by reading through this weblog was his sarcasm, and it really sticks out when he uses it. He has a sense of humor that I found hilarious, and that’s probably because it’s much like my own – dry, witty, and sometimes has the tendency to be quite biting. This is probably why I enjoyed his writing.

The site is still young, having only rolled out, from what I can see, in mid-October 2005. Just because he’s new to the blogging world (or perhaps just this particular weblog), he doesn’t waste any time at all before tackling current issues found in the media that some people might tiptoe around. He gives readers some background information into the history of The Church of Scientology, and anyone following the tabloids can appreciate his information on where and how the religion actually began.

DWB just started a new feature with his site – Real Men (or Women) of Genius. This is nothing like the commercialized versions of Bud Light’s Real Men of Genius that show up every once in a while on TV. The first nomination went to Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Peace Prize winner from 1970. Not only does this site get a chuckle from its readers from time to time, but you learn something, too. Not a bad combination for a weblog.

The site’s hosted by Blog*Spot and uses yet another standardized Blogger two-column template. Links of all realms are listed down the right hand side of the weblog’s entries. It’s a very standard black text on white background, which makes the site easy to read and that’s always appreciated.

The Disgruntled Wogbeast is off to a good start. It does a good job of keeping the attention of readers by providing small paragraphs that are well written and straight to the point. If readers are looking to learn something new now and again, and read the posts of someone that can keep them entertained, this is a good place to start. Once this site has established itself and been online long enough to gather a good number of readers, the interaction on these posts will become another pleasurable portion of the site.
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KillJim.com. I can’t explain why, but I really loved that domain name from the second I saw it. The best domain names are ones you do not forget, and I think it would be pretty darn impossible to get something like KillJim.com out of your head.

This starts out to be a group weblog, with the main author of the site inviting people that can contribute to Kill Jim on a regular basis, but winds up being the brainchild of the creator, James. He’s a 20 year old from New Zealand, according to the informational page about the authors of the site.

With only three months of archives listed on the site, there unfortunately aren’t really that many posts to read. Sadly, the humor in most of these posts will probably be lost on some viewers. Not everyone can appreciate James’ excitement about becoming a sniper for the U.S. Army (if he were an American) and popping off the heads of terrorists one by one. And I’m fairly certain there are blog-readers out there who won’t be entertained by the entries written about getting drunk beyond belief and deciding which disco ball he likes the most. Me? I was entertained. Immensely.

Every once in a while, one of the authors will share a link they’ve found on a different site somewhere, but that’s definitely not the main focus of the site. In my opinion, it’s a site that’s made to entertain – short, sometimes eccentric entries that may or may not have a point, and may or may not strike its intended audience as funny.

The design used for KillJim.com fits the site perfectly. No frills, nothing fancy – just a design that does the job. The title of the site is in the upper left-hand corner of the site, with a link to the archives and the authors listed below. James lists a few of his favorite links below, and the rest of the site displays the weblog entries.

This is a site that’s not going to be entertaining for everyone, and a site like that is hard to rate. While this site is not the average mainstream site, it is very well written, complimented with a very nice design. Having said that, it deserves a good ranking like the one I’ve given. NULL