Category: Uncategorized

I liked this site as soon as I entered. It wasn’t fussy or overcrowded and has just about everything you’d want in a site: clean layout, very readable posts, a thorough “about” section, some good links and even poetry.

In writing about his daily life, Amor covers a lot of subjects: love, religion, girls, friends, and goes from funny to thought provoking. Some favourites, that give an idea of the variety, are “Radio Flyer” descibing an incident in a toy store and “Amor in Review”. I was surprised to read a recent post in which Amor writes of his feelings for a girl and says, “she’s probably going to read this.” Most people edit what they write when they know that those close to them will be reading, but this constant openness is one of the real gifts of the site.

The layout, in popular blues, greys and whites, is simple to navigate and although it is unadventurous, it looks very clean and professional. There is a good space for the blog, so the writing is not cramped, and the top navigation bar allows you to move around the sections easily. There is also a column for archives, photos and external links. The photos are accompanied by amusing captions, such as, “Virgil was just testing out his new digital camera. I was testing out my new silly grin. I think it needs more grin and less silly.” Another column has pictures of, and links to, the books, games and music that Amor is currently using, which allows you to see even more into the life of the author.

Through his weblog, Amor comes across as warm, friendly and fun. His refreshing honesty and straight-forward writing style make this an attractive read and really warmed me to him. The site had me rooting for him and made me want to return over and over.Amor said

By far, this is the most aptly titled blog I’ve ever read. At first glance Someone Called James seems like it would be a short read, being only two months old, but James has done a lot of writing in the last two months, pretty enjoyable writing at that.

James, an 18 year old living in the United Kingdom describes why he started his blog in his first entry as; “I just want somewhere to ramble on about my life, my thoughts, my feelings – infact just me in general.” Which is pretty much why we all started our weblogs. The differance between most weblogs and James’s, is that his is pretty interesting and at times, even though the author probably doesn’t realize it, is pretty gosh darn funny. In his January 2nd entry James writes about the breakup with his longtime girlfriend and how he has still remained good friends with her; “But i suppose in a way we never split up. We just stopped having sex – perhaps we got married when I wasn’t looking.” That comment is just hilarious!

Although this blog is only two months old, James is quite a prolific writer, I spent just as much time reading this weblog as I did reading weblogs that have been around for five or six months. There is no “About” section or “FAQ”, but by just reading this weblog’s entries for the last two months I felt I kind of knew who the author was. I think I found out more about him than an FAQ or “About” section could provide by just reading the blog. How rare is that?

The author doesn’t just talk about his own personal issues though, in his January 17th entry he takes the British media to task: “Maybe if they stopped moaning and looked at themselves, they would realise that the problem with Britain today isn’t asylum seakers, or rising crime, or the imaginary persecution of the ‘middle classes’, but the bigoted attitudes they encourage daily.”

The site design is user friendly, easy to read, I had no trouble navigating it, and had no trouble getting to the archives. There were no broken links.

I’m giving Someone Called James at 3.5, even though its only a couple months old, because this blog seems like a “true” journal. The author writes candidly about his personal life, its entertaining, and I enjoyed his dry humor. In a few months when there is more content this weblog will probably be a “five”. This journal has a pretty gosh darn good start. Three and a half stars, check it out.

someonecalledjames

Brandon, the author and creator of The Chirish Website, is a high school senior, and a self-admitted computer geek. A lot of his posts deal with high school life or that “geeky coding stuff” he seems to enjoy so much. Posting what you like or what you enjoy is usually what defines a weblog, and it does just that.

In all honesty, there were many entries I read where I had absolutely no idea what was going on or who was being talked about. However, I’m sure that the people Brandon addresses in these posts know exactly what’s happening. It’s just one of those very personal weblogs where you might actually have to know the author to “get it”.

This is a relatively new weblog to join the ranks of the thousands and thousands out there. Brandon’s only been keeping this weblog since mid-December 2002, but he’s already put a lot of evident hard work and time into the site, both the programming behind it as well as always adding more and more sections to peruse while visiting the site.

The site design is extremely functional and very easy to use/navigate. The different shades of blue all look pleasant together. It’s simple to tell what may be a link and what’s not and there’s not much to try and question when looking at the design. It’s very straight forward and works great for Brandon’s weblog and the rest of the sections of his site.

These sections are also a great addition to the site and definitely worth checking out while you’re there. The games portion of it literally kept me occupied for hours. All I needed was more things to keep me planted in front of the computer and the links Brandon has available to online games definitely did just that.

The Chirish Website is definitely one that focuses solely around Brandon’s personal life. While the biggest part of the site deals with what’s going on in his life on a daily basis, by following it for a while you begin to feel like you quite possibly fit right in to his daily routine. I would suggest checking this site out just to see if Brandon’s the kind of guy you’d like to keep tabs on from day to day.

chirish.com

Created on January 1st 2003, BluesBlog narrowly escapes the ‘no more than 2.0’ “evil” rule. Perhaps because of its young age, BluesBlog looks somewhat amateurish with it’s simple design and lack of organization. But all is not lost. Far from that.

As the blog title suggests, BluesBlog deals with the Blues genre. A little reading shows that the blog is frequently more concerned with the music scene around Tokyo, Japan, with updates and reviews of gigs aplenty. I find this refreshing and interesting: Instead of reviewing albums, blog owner Les actually visits local performances and reports on them. Also, music fans around Les’ area would benefit a lot by visiting BluesBlog, as there are often pre-announced performance dates.

I feel that as a blog under the ‘Music’ category, BluesBlog has all the ingredients and potential to become an important Blues website with authority. But first, some work has to be done. For starters, I think it would improve the site immensely if Les could separate Blues news, upcoming gigs, performance reviews and personal ramblings. Readers would benefit by finding music information they are seeking easier, instead of having to sift through details about Les’ daily life. Vice versa for readers more interested about Les the person. Seeing that Les has won some awards and is even the 1st Asian Blues Hall of Fame Ambassador, I believe this style of organization will lend a professional feel to the site.

As mentioned earlier, BluesBlog has all the right things to make it an influential and important site for one often overlooked music genre, if worked on. Perhaps with time it will be so.

BluesBlog

First and foremost, ‘script furnace’ is a group weblog. The site states that there are twenty-eight authors in all, but currently only a handful of those twenty-eight post actively.

Most group weblogs are either news/links blogs, or center around a main issue. Not the case with ‘script furnace’. This is a group weblog under the Personal category, which means that everyone posts about his or her life and his or her thoughts, independent of each other. As can be imagined, this leads to a certain amount of confusion as to who’s-who (not to mention what’s-what, where’s-where and when’s-when) for the new reader.

The best feature of ‘script furnace’ is how the authors ask for feedback regularly and encourage discussion. They also interact through the comment system. I would say that a visit to ‘script furnace’ is not complete without also going through the comments after each post. Although there are some pretty interesting entries about the authors’ personal lives, the most engaging posts are those concerning current events and issues that most people can relate to, because, lets face it, reading about someone getting laid off in between opinions about the war on Iraq just doesn’t have the impact it would normally have on a purely personal website.

Layout wise, ‘script furnace’ is clean and simple, with a neat archive system that every group weblog should have. The archives can be browsed by week, by month, and by category, which makes reading a whole lot more easier and fun.

To readers who are not familiar with the authors’ personal lives, the random and sporadic entries about what happened to them and what they did seems somewhat mundane, considering we are given brief and disconnected glimpses of different persons’ lives, all thrown in together. Perhaps ‘script furnace’ should add one more feature: allow readers to go through the archives by author. ‘script furnace’s strong points are its authors ability to strike a chord with readers, to get readers to response, and to touch on issues that readers actually care about. It is, after all, a group weblog, and any group weblog without some form of bond between its authors is not a good group weblog.

script furnace