Month: November 2004

What A Beautiful Day is an extremely simple blog visually. I wonder if this is the simplest blogspot template available? Green header and white background. The text portion is quite wide and dominates the page. The author has been blogging here for one year.

This blog is mainly what I would describe as a kind of spiritual journal. There are entries about her family and a new house that her husband built for them, but mostly it centers around insights she is having in her life. There are descriptions of religious services she attended and what she learned from them and bible verses with commentary on what they mean to her. It is an intensely personal place where her faith is unabashedly displayed. The writing is straightforward and understandable, albeit with some grammatical errors here and there.

The only other thing on the page is a dated archive list, a moderate list of her favorite bloggers and a few web tool sites. No frills. Our author does not seem to be interested in the way the blog looks, but has her focus elsewhere.

This site would appeal to a Christian audience, or anyone curious about the inner spiritual life of a person of that faith.

xiuxin.blogspot.com

The Thinking Woman’s Diary is without a doubt the most elegant on line journal I have ever seen. Though to be fair, it is a personal web page, unfettered by hosted blog templates and limitations. But it’s a beauty. If for no other reason than this, you should go take a look.

Being used to several other types of navigation, I fumbled around a while trying to figure out what was what on the site, and how to get to it. I finally gave up the idea of chronology, for her posts really do not have that much date dependent material, the entries are more along the lines of gentle philosophical musings contained in separate categories. Some of these include: Nature, Life’s Treats, Passion, Travel, Good Life, you get the idea. So it really doesn’t matter what the date is while reading most of these essays. She has been writing here since April of 2004.

I would consider her style more in the creative writing arena, rather than a daily diary. She writes with grace and elegance on an astonishing array of subjects. If you look in the “Your Say, My Say” section, there will be a comprehensive bio that helps us put our author in perspective. Perhaps her world traveling has helped her become such an excellent writer.

Of course I have no way of knowing how many visitors our blogger is attracting, but there are very few comments posted. This is the one advantage to having your blog on a hosted site. You inherit a built in community of fellow journalists and can quickly make connections and friends. I hope that being reviewed at Weblog Review will increase her readership. She deserves to be read.

The one thing that I could not find on this diary was a notify function. I would suggest to our author that she consider adding one. It is a much better way to let people know you have updated, than expecting them to check in every day. There are absolutely no links whatsoever on this site either. A kind of breath of fresh air after some of the recent blogs I have reviewed.

By all means, please take a look at this blog. If for no other reason than to observe what I consider to be a benchmark of great journaling design. And stay a while to read a few very well written essays. I recommend “The Curse of the Easy Option” found in the Philosophy category as a good place to start.

The Thinking Woman’s Diary

The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Person doesn’t look like much from far away and I imagine that most people who spot it will be like me and be instantly turned off by it. But my first encounter with this site was much like a caveman’s first encounter with a Raptor egg. If I had listened to my primitive reflexes and ran away, I would’ve never enjoyed the sweet, creamy, yellowy yolk that lay within.

There is no actual “about me” page (the about me page is actually an archive of posts that appear to have been written before she started using blogspot), but if the Alberta license plate avatar on the front page and her recent posts about the Calgary Flames are any indication, the blogger, Kaetlan, hails from Canada. The blog itself is a regaling of her daily adventures in and around her town and humorous personal insights on various subjects. From time to time, Kaetlan mixes it up a bit and lists things like, “22 Things I’ve Learned Since I Became A Massage Therapist” where she mentions how her clients think she’s actually a prostitute.

The design of the site is nothing to do cartwheels over. It’s a blogspot template with links and archives plastered on the left side of the page and the body of the blog on the right. Posts are archived by month, so you have to read through quite a bit of text if you’re searching for a specific post. Extras include a small Photo Album, an Amazon gift registry, and a mini store that sells clothing with her design on it.

The eyes are not treated to anything shiny or attractive when first visiting The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Person, but upon further surfing of the site you feel anything but disappointed. In fact, I felt quite warm and fuzzy in the end. No, her corner of the web isn’t lined with fluffy wool or filled with teddy bears. To be more exact, the site is, as she put it, “an insidious, subversive, positively Communist site devoted solely to the purpose of providing a forum for the Author’s ill-considered and unwarranted megalomania.” While not as Communist as it is insidious, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Person is a blog even Joseph Stalin would enjoy. It is a lighthearted view into a young Canadian woman’s day-to-day life that is good for a few chuckles. I give this site a 4.0, but it could score higher if she polishes up the design a bit.The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Person

I said once before that I hate being honest sometimes and that still stands. So here goes. When I first entered this one, my first impression was not a very good one. What I saw was your very basic blog using one of those frequently used (but very boring) “Blogspot” templates. At the top of the page were the words “Talking Sideways”, which was the title of the blog.

Well everyone has heard the saying that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover . With that thought in mind , I dug right into the blog itself to begin my journey of reading.

As usual, the first thing I did was look for an “About” page. I like to read a bit about the author first so I can get an inside look at who the author is so I can get a better handle on what the blog is all about. To my disappointment, there was not one thing there that could tell me anything about the author.

At that point, I began to read the entries. First of all , the blog hasn’t had a new update in over a month. I read the main page and most of the archives. I would have read all of the archives but couldn’t because my eyes started to get blurry from the strain. Let me explain. Most of the writing by Crazy Dave (the author), is very crammed together. His sentences don’t leave much space in between. It was as if I were reading one long paragraph without taking a breath. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about in most of his entries. There were some of his posts I had to read over 2 or 3 times, just to see if I could understand them. It was really putting a strain on my eyes.
Besides all that, it didn’t help that there were a lot of spelling and grammar errors.

On the right hand side of Dave’s blog, are his archives and several links. All his links are working properly and fast loading. But the problem with his links are they are all out of date. Well at least most of them. I went through each and every one of them and there are about 4 of those links that are still active. The rest haven’t posted since 2003 etc.

Dave doesn’t frequently update his blog so it seems. Therefor, I don’t really expect it to be around all that long. If your eyes get strained easily, I would not recommend paying a visit to this site.http://crazy-dave.blogspot.com

When I popped open this site to review, I had no idea what to expect because of the simple fact that a site with the moniker “bullshit” could be just about anything. Boldly, I plunged in and waited for the page to load.

I was greeted by a grinning Joker visage up in the upper left hand corner upon my arrival (very nice, I’m a Batman freak), and the actual title of the site – Joker’s Linkdump . For those unfamiliar with the term, a linkdump refers to a page where – you guessed it – links to other pages are posted or “dumped” all in one convenient place. Onward I forged.

I would say, conservatively, that 65 to 70% of the links point to women in various stages of undress (Not that I have any sort of problem with that – quite the contrary, actually). Although this would be considered by some to be a very valuable service, you can basically find this type of thing anywhere on the net by doing a search in any popular search engine. The rest of his links run the gamut of topics from online games to accident pictures (I kid you not). In short, it’s what any bored guy from 18-34 is probably looking at on the internet when he has nothing else to do. In this mere fact alone, he is very successful in reaching what seems to be his target demographic.

The presentation is pretty basic with several links per day posted and and list of other sites over to your right. It’s nothing spectacular to look at, but definitely serves its purpose. If you’re into this sort of thing, which I would bet the farm many folks are, this is a great site to get your daily fix of random linkage and I would give it a 5/5 for you folks. As far as weblogs go, though, it doesn’t fit the mold of what one would classify as a “must visit” stop on the internet. It’ll either “do it” for you, or it won’t… I tired with it pretty quickly and it’s for this reason I give it a 2.5 out of 5.

bull shit