Month: October 2004

I am currently in two minds what score to give this blog- either a 3.5 or 4. So I will write my review and see what comes out of it. My experience with reading “My Life is Better Than Yours” (aka “Fountain of Pee”) has been one of great first impressions followed by discovering some very funny and enjoyable stories, with enthusiasm then waning quite considerably as the novelty wore off rather sooner than I was expecting it too. Bit of an anti climax really, after an hour of ploughing through the archives. Let me explain.

When I first entered the site I saw a personalised, simple template with a few pictures and a menu bar. It was clearly a blog which had been around a while – it just had that feel about it somehow, and looking at the menu bar confirmed that the archives went back a couple of years, though postings were somewhat sporadic over this time. I found the “About Me” page and was pleasantly surprised to find that the author had a sense of humour and also a penchant for being offensive, though he was keen to point out that he is not offensive to be nasty, just to be funny. So whilst the blog is offensive in places- swearing, a smidgeon of homophobia here, a modicum of sexism there, it is more a long the lines of Viz or Eminem, rather than Hitler or Mussolini. Not to be taken too seriously. Having said that, if you do find Eminem offensive, maybe this blog isn’t for you.

The first few posts were funny. Most noticeably, he slagged of the TV series “Friends”, which I enjoyed enormously. One thing I quickly picked up about the posts were that they all contain links, but 99 percent of these simply bring up pop- up pictures/ photos/ cartoons which are fairly unrelated but often extremely funny at best, or at worst just plain silly. It does mean you can read all the posts without having to worry about the links at all really, though if you want an extra laugh, they are there all the same.

Now the author is primarily a funny story teller. Most are stories about his life, both past and present, with a few observations about TV shows or politics thrown in. There are usually plenty of comments too, which adds an extra dimension to the content. The author shares his life with us, including his daughter “curly top”, and things he gets up to at work – the subtitle “Fountain of Pee” comes from a pee/ daughter related story which is, in itself, rather amusing. The point though, is once you get past the funny stories and witty pop up pictures, you are not really left with much else. Now some readers may like to visit this blog simply to have a laugh and take their minds off things for a while- super, smashing, great. But by the time I had got through the first few months, I was left wanting MORE. Like the guy in the pub who can tell wonderful stories and get everyone laughing, but leaves you wanting to go and discuss philosophy with someone else, just to balance things out a bit. Maybe all I am trying to say in my rather long-winded way, is that the blog became superficial after a while and I ended up bored.

So I have settled on a four then. The author can, after all, tell a good story and he has put a lot of work in to his funny pictures. But like I say, I was left wanting more. More substance and less swagger.My Life is Better than Yours

I now believe in love at first sight. Upon hearing the name ‘cow-dog’, I half expected a deadbeat 16 year old stoner’s site to come up, complete with ramblings about how much Bush sucks and poorly scanned drawings of pot leaves. What I found, instead, was a very pleasant surprise. Picture of Wonder Woman + the nickname ‘Cow Dog, Princess of Power” + 27 year old school teacher = one very interesting personality. The site had all sorts of neat little features to it, including a few pictures, an Amazon Wish List, and some various links to friends’ weblogs and other sites of interest.

The extra features, however, can’t even come close to matching the clever, often hilarious weblog entries. Having grown up in a household with two school teachers, I thought I’d heard every story possible. But this weblog is packed full of hilarious musings and anecdotes from the classroom as well as clever insight into other aspects of her personal life. The weblog is peppered with the occasional pictures (not the “I’m trying to be an artist pictures” but real, topical pictures), personality surveys, and ‘Which kind of ______ are you?’ quizzes. I have to say that I normally pass on the latter two but they seem to mesh well with the overall light-hearted theme of this site. The writing is intelligent and interesting and I can honestly say I laughed out loud SEVERAL times while reading this. If you’re wondering how you can possibly make a truly ‘personal’ weblog that deals with only your life experiences fun and interesting for anyone to read, this is a prime example. She doesn’t hesitate to reveal anything and everything that’s going on in her life and she tells it like it is. Usually with just a slight self-depreciating undertone that helps the reader identify and relate to her current predicament.

The layout is extremely simple. It’s powered by (surprise, surprise) Movable Type with a very basic structure focusing solely on the weblog and not cluttered with a lot of other pointless features. I had no trouble finding and accessing the archives, and navigating back and forth in time was a cinch. My only complaint about the actual mechanics of the site were some errors in the info boxes that popped up when you mouse over the links. Sometimes I couldn’t get the info boxes to disappear. Instead, they followed my cursor around the screen and wouldn’t leave until I clicked out of the browser. This, however, may have been due to the fact that I use a (brace yourselves) Mac. Overall, the simple design with visually appealing fonts and graphics won me over. There is nothing intimidating about this site’s design – instead it begs you to read more.

Overall, I had a great time reading this weblog. In a sea of sometimes pointless and boring babble, this is one user who truly deserves to be sharing her thoughts online. Not because she has any sort of Earth-shattering revelations to share with the masses or because her personal situation is remarkably unique. Simply because she has a way of looking at life that will hopefully rub off on us all when we read this. A real person facing real problems looking at it in a REALLY funny way. This site is going on my RSS client and in my bookmark list. I only hope one of her troublesome students doesn’t accidentally stumble upon it someday!cowdog~!

My first impression of Rebel Yell was a little less than good. Admittedly, this was due to what appears to be a confederate flag in the logo, which to me, doesn’t exactly conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings. The statement “Just ‘cause I talk slow don’t mean I’m stupid” was a little bit of a put-off, as well, until I realized the grammatical nightmare of that sentence was most likely intentional. Even up here in Canada we understand the stereotype placed upon those from the South.

Initial impressions aside, I was pleased with the quality of the content of this blog. It’s certainly well written and concise. Stoney makes it very clear what his opinions are. Granted, I don’t really share these opinions, myself, but I certainly know others out there do. Stoney’s feelings really come through well in the posts, and that’s something that cannot be overlooked. There’s a happy balance of political and personal posts to be found here. There are even some silly posts peppered throughout, though they still carry weight, like this one.

Stoney informs the reader that he’s a Republican and a very military-minded person, who was in the Air Force. I can’t personally relate to either of these things, which made it a little hard for me to get very into many of the posts. However, that being said, Stoney’s passion and the obvious fact that he’s quite proud of this stance and his views (and his life, for that matter) is quite impressive. Given the current events in the States, a lesser man may shy away from being so bold. Kudos to Stoney for standing firm.

There were a few things in this blog that were a little offensive to me, personally, and I would assume, to others. The “…freaky-eyed raghead…” comment in the post from March 8th was one of them. I’m all for freedom of speech, but sometimes there’s a nicer way to get the same point across. Thankfully, there are many posts that are quite wonderful, and nearly heart-warming, that made up for the few that upset me.

The design of this site is very clean and simple. It’s not impressive, but for a blog of this type, you really wouldn’t want it to be. By what I got to know about Stoney, he’s a simple man who doesn’t want any of the bells and whistles that some people feel the need for. If you ask me, the look of this site meshes quite well with the content. The only flaw I found was when using Internet Explorer, all of the content in the sidebar ended up being pushed down to the bottom of the page. In Firefox, the page displays perfectly.

The ‘About the Author’ page is extremely short and to the point. Thankfully, the ‘100 things about Stoney’ page makes up for that, by providing much more of a look into the man behind the blog. I had a good time looking through the ‘stoneycam’ images. This area of the site was a welcome feature that impressed me quite a bit. Some of the pictures were quite moving, actually.

Rebel Yell is definitely different than any blog I would normally read, but I know this must be a favourite among many people out there. It’s a very good-quality blog with a lot of promise. I have a feeling this is going to be quite a popular blog in the very near future.
Rebel Yell

A Constant Stream of Useless Information is certainly aptly named. A constant stream of information that means nothing to anyone but the author. This is a truly personal blog of a young girl by the name of Stephanie who is a sophomore at high school. It’s an amusing and surprisingly well-written (but for the occasional blatant spelling error) teen blog that documents the life and times of Stephanie at school, at home and at play.

My initial thought about the design of the blog was “Hey! This is pretty!”. No disgusting and torturous colors to contend with. No “leet” speech, no “u”, “ur”, “2” or “gr8” stuff anywhere either which I definitely appreciated – actually, I came close to dropping to my knees and praising the gods for that. It’s a very functional layout with muted, pretty colors. It’s quite different and definitely a nice change on the usual Blogspot layouts. The content is easy to read and there’s a nice little extra frame which lists all the usual bloggy stuff that shows her archives and favorite links. There’s also a little listing of books Stephanie is reading (or has recently read), music (this girl loves classical – very cool) and television shows.

As I mentioned before, Constant will mean very little to the average blog reader because it is written around this young girls life and all of her friends. I sifted through the archives and found much of the same which was unfortunate as it didn’t hold my attention for very long. If Stephanie wants to generate a little more interest for readers, she might want to consider making a list of all her friends and putting up an “about them” page. I think that’s what makes the blog a little dull – Stephanie knows what Stephanie talking about, but we (the readers) haven’t got the foggiest! I think the only way you’d really know is to read the blog from the beginning to the current entry to understand the background in her relationships and events in Stephanie’s life, but there’s just too many entries to manage that.

All in all though it’s a nice little blog and I get the feeling that other youngsters in high school will relate to the posts. A Constant Stream of Useless Information

My first impressions of “Malibu” were good ones – she has her own domain name, an MT blog with different skins to choose from and some “About Me” stuff to get people started off with.

The templates (about seven in all) seemed to work well and look good, and it was nice that she had differentiated the ones suitable for lower resolutions. After browsing through them all, I ended up settling on the “Cat” one and then had a look round to see what there was in the way of other extras. I was quite pleased that there wasn’t too much junk in the sidebars, which seems to find its way in to a lot of blogs. There were simply the usual archives (by category or date), recent comments and two different “About Me” pages. I found the traditional “About Me” more interesting and in depth than the “Alpha-Bio”, but both were informative and helpful nevertheless. Looking through the archives, it seems that she used to have a photoblog and had removed it for one reason or another, which I felt was a shame as this also meant that a lot of the pictures in her archive postings were non-existent too. I always like nosing through a good Photoblog!

So on to the content, and one little niggle I had straight away was the spelling. Now I don’t usually bother to point out the odd spelling mistake or typo in a review, but unfortunately with this weblog it did affect my reading enjoyment somewhat, and in some cases it was difficult to work out what was being said. I know it can be a pain in the arse to put all our postings through a spell checker, but on the other hand a lot of the errors Malibu had could have been resolved simply by reading through the entry first, before posting it up. Ok, lecture over.

Generally speaking this is a personal weblog which doesn’t shine in any areas particularly, but is nevertheless an enjoyable read overall. There are some good personal posts as well as the usual quizzes and links to interesting news sites and such. Although Malibu tends to give herself a hard time for not updating regularly (though there is plenty of content here) or providing (what she considers to be) interesting content, there are some good posts to be found all the same. The ones I enjoyed the most were the longer, more personal ones about her father’s difficulties, the problems and successes she has had with work and her angst about relationships. This meatier stuff is always worth a read in my opinion, though it probably makes me some kind of emotional leech, thriving off people’s misfortunes and dramas in life. Oh well. The point I am making is that there are certainly some areas which show promise here, and if maybe she continued working on these, she might not feel so bad about her blogging abilities.

Overall then I enjoyed my time here and the site certainly has the potential for a bright future. Hopefully the author will, in time be able to relax in to her role as blogger a little more and the blog will then really start to thrive.
malibu