Month: January 1970

As I loaded BeingSteve.com into Internet Explorer, the first thing I thought was – Wow, that’s big. There’s a huge logo that greets you. It doesn’t take long to load, but if you’re still using a 800×600 screen resolution, don’t even think about it looking nice. The header image is a 988 x 248. Even at 1024 x 768, I still had to do a little left-to-right scrolling to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything.

The latest post on Being Steve is one of the neatest posts I’ve read in a long time. It was written on Friday, October 14th, 2005, shortly before he left for a weekend away with his girlfriend of two years. The post is the text of an email he’d written to ask her parents if he could marry their daughter. Instead of using the chicken way out, as he put it, he ended up asking them via telephone and has plans to ask her to marry him this weekend. So, hopefully, by the time this review is being read, Steve’s girlfriend will have said yes, he’ll return to blogging as a happily engaged man.

The rest of the blog, while not as lovey-dovey and sickeningly cute as the post I just mentioned, it’s fun to read. The way Steve writes is very conversational. He’s not writing a report on “What I on My Summer Vacation”, and he’s not trying to write America’s next great novel either. His posts typically describe his every day life – shopping for things in bulk, comparing nipples with his girlfriend, and his reaction to the “Who Makes Movies?” message they play at the beginning of movies in the theater. Steve has regular gripes just like the rest of it, and the way he writes them out gives many people, I’m sure, a feeling of familiarity with Steve.

Some of the posts are very long, but the majority of them are just the right length – you don’t get tired reading that much, but you feel like Steve really explained what it was he was trying to convey instead of leaving readers stuck with questions.

The color scheme is my biggest complaint about this site. Okay, it’s my only complaint. As I noticed when the site first loaded, the header image is enormous. The background of the site is black, and the font that was chosen is a turquoise-ish Comic Sans. It’s incredibly hard to read, and I often found myself squinting just to finish up a post. The rest of the layout is a typical two-column layout – the weblog portion of the site in a main portion, and a sidebar with the archives, photos, and links on the other.

In short, Steve is just a regular guy, with a regular life, running into the regular problems that anyone else will. That is what makes this blog enjoyable to read.

The site started back in June 2002. No, I didn’t read every post, but if I have bookmarked the site so I don’t miss any of the new posts. Besides, I have to find out what his girlfriend said to his proposal!
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My curiosity and interest was definitely piqued by the title of this blog. With a title as “Legends of the Drunken Master”, I expected something either extremely funny, or extremely witty, maybe even both. I liked the layout when I first saw it and there were just a lot of things to check out.

The posts are mainly rant-style journal posts. Meaning, some are rants, some are just regular posts, but most are a combination of the two. I was not disappointed once I started reading them. The posts are clever and witty and you can hear the tone of the author as you are reading it. I call it a somewhat talent. The titles are pretty awesome, too. I found “Beaverness” amusing. His posts run mostly along the lines of talking about a certain event or subject and integrating his thoughts within it. It’s not too bad.

The layout is just wonderful, in my opinion. It’s colorful, fancy and just plain eye-catching. He has a sort-of banner that I found really funny and the little sections keeps people updated on what is which and which is what.

Overall, I loved it. There were frequent posts with interesting topics about his life, love and other whatnots. There’s the “Hottie of the Week” section which, I’m sure, makes a lot of guys happy. Kudos on the great blog!NULL

I liked the catchy subtitle this blog has: The darker side of technology, it’s fun over here… I skimmed over it a little and I was a little disappointed at the infrequent rate the author updates this blog. There are posts where months come by before a new one is made. I always believed in regular posting.

The blog content itself is quite interesting. It’s about the personal life of the author, Shadow. His profile says he is an avid gamer and computer-user and there are things here that talk about his projects and goals in that area. I found a little hard to follow the posts he had mainly because of their infrequency. The posts are well-written, with proper grammar and mostly correct spelling – kudos for that – and they can be quite interesting.

The design is very simple, nothing fancy but it is organized, and that’s good. The black background definitely complements the author’s name (or pseudonym).

Overall, it’s definitely among the above-average blogs out there. But there’s not much that stands out. That could be a goal, or maybe there isn’t a goal after all other than as a place to write thoughts and other whatnots.NULL

So, yeah, I guess the title says it all. Not that Adam actually rants about anything, but it’s a blog filled with personal posts (even though it’s under the entertainment category in the weblogreview thing) and it’s written – now, guess! – by some Adam guy.

And I say “some Adam guy” not as a way to diminish him, but because you cannot easily find any information about him. There’s no profile to be read. I know he’s Irish, I know he studies something and I know he’s been in love with Jennie. That he fancies jokes – blonde jokes and the kind, which you can read in separate pages he keeps – and babes. And those are the things I could pick up by reading his first entries and the last ones.

The layout is quite simple but very nice. All links work okay. There are some categories he came up with, but they are rather irrelevant in my opinion (well, they may be useful if you want to skip posts on babes). There’s an RSS feeder thing, which is cool. Uncool: “read more” link. You’re reading the post, you want to read more and suddenly you realize you have to click there to continue with the reading. And that takes you to another page, where there’s only one post and if you want to come back to the main page, click here again, mate. So… tiring. Or I’m just being picky.

I know I might made Adam sound sound like an uninteresting person –or at least made his blog sound like an uninteresting blog- , but he’s not. I wouldn’t say I’d read his blog often, but that’s only because personal blogs are that way. You either fall for the person at first sight or not. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad blog, although I can assure it’s not a wonderful blog either.
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I love to read and I love to write and when I read the title I thought this could be a really cool blog on a writer’s life and his thoughts on creativity and stuff, kind of a Paul Auster’s book, perhaps? – although I realize I’d be expecting a bit too much. Or maybe an editor’s life and how it’s great to get to read all these books and choose what’s going to be published or not and tell to the writer’s face their book is really awesome or is just a piece of shit (pardon my French) and that they shouldn’t have spent so much energy and paper and electricity on keeping the computer on to write such things.

So, hey, yeah!, I was right! David is an editor! Not the coold editor type, but still. By reading his profile, we get to know that David likes Queen (the band, yes) and is the editor of the North Cheshire Family Historian. Oh, great. That should be fun to read. Maybe some funny family stories, murders, births, the whole life and death mystery revealed through anonymous people’s stories. But I’m sorry to say this blog is not about that. Mostly, it’s about churches – with pictures -, churchyards, and guess? Cheshire. Of course the only one I know from Cheshire would be the cat, from ‘Alice in the Wonderland’, so I don’t think that would enough to get my attention. Here and there a note about being an editor, but not that interesting either. Okay, to be fair, it’s about David’s life and what he does.

The layout is a basic Blogger template. All the links work fine. There’s not a lot of material to read, since the blog is recent. And there’s nowhere to comment on the posts (you never know if someone would be really interested in checking people’s graves inscriptions – and there might be), but you can e-mail with David if you wish.

All in all, the blog is just plain unappealing, I’m afraid. I’d love to say otherwise, but I’m being totally honest. Maybe it’s just that it’s meant to be read by people who dig the same things David does, and I’m not one of them, unfortunately. NULL