Category: Uncategorized

Right away, I knew exactly the type of entries I would read when visiting “Hooah Wife”. In short, the author of the weblog is Greta, who is a very proud military wife. Her posts usually reflect this in some manger.

Blogger powers the site, but Greta’s went to extensive work to stray from the packaged templates that are so ubiquitous. In true military style, the design uses red, white, and blue throughout the layout. She’s chosen a three-column layout, which works nicely for the amount of content she includes. The side columns border the daily entries, and are filled with links, webrings, archives, credits, and anything else you can imagine.

Greta advertises her “new blog” called “Elephant in My Coffee” in May 2005. “Elephant in My Coffee” is a collaborative effort with a couple of other authors, so Greta keeps on plugging away on her own weblog, too.

Random bit of technical info – I read the first two months of posts, feeling bad for the author that there were never any comments left in the earlier months – the comment counter always shows zero comments had been made. It wasn’t until the third months of posts that I finally clicked on the link to leave a comment, where I saw that people are leaving comments – the JavaScript for the Haloscan comments just isn’t showing how many comments are left. At some point through the site, the comments link finally started showing up correctly. Rather odd!

I mentioned earlier that Greta’s posts reflect her position as a military wife. The archives on this site date back to October 2004, shortly before the 2004 Presidential election for the United States. There is not a post that is written from the time the weblog starts to the day of the election that fails to mention why voters should re-elect President Bush. This, of course, could easily turn Democratic voters away from reading anything else, but it seems like the majority of the regular visitors to this site tend to agree with Greta’s political beliefs.

Greta writes about an entire realm of things. Over the past year, many of her posts have been closely related to her husband being deployed to the Middle East. Fortunately, he gets to call and email what seems like somewhat regularly, and it looks like he will be coming back home sometime in the very near future. Reading about Greta’s “temporary single parent life”, as she often puts it, and how she copes with the news coming over form that part of a world definitely gives readers a different look into what we only hear or see in the media.

The opinions expressed on this weblog walk a fine line of being the best thing about it and being the lone thing that deters visitors with differing opinions. Personally, I have just about the exact opposite of political beliefs that Greta has. While I found the constant reaming of the Democratic party to get a little on the tiresome side, I looked back at my own weblog and realized she would probably think the same thing of my opinions.

I would recommend this site for people living in the United States, curious about what really goes on in the personal side of our military. We hear the stories from newspapers and TV, but this gives readers a real insight to what happens behind the scenes with this Hooah Wife and her family. NULL

You know what I really enjoy in a weblog? Knowing who or what I’m going to be reading about. The Antique Mommy doesn’t waste any time with that by providing readers with a brief introduction to her weblog right at the top of the site’s layout: “I was nearly 44 when I had my baby. This blog chronicles the mostly joys and sometimes challenges of living in the brave new world of hot flashes, sloppy cookie kisses and trimming itty bitty finger nails while wearing bi-focals.”

The site only has archives listing back to July 2005. The very first post goes into detail on how The Antique Mommy wound up a mommy, and how she decided on this name of this weblog. It’s a really great entry to start off this weblog, and I felt like I knew quite a bit more about the “behind the scenes” life of The Antique Mommy. It’s a great way to start reading this site.

The design is simple. It’s a site hosted by Blog*Spot, and appears to be somewhat of a standard template. It’s a two-column design that compliments the site well. With her profile at the top of the site, it immediately clues readers in on the information they’re about to read. She lists her archives, recent posts, and different blogs she reads along the left-hand column. The different browns that are used in the layout – the different pattern background, the hyperlinks, and the color used behind the text – all mesh very well together. Unlike many sites, this is one that’s very visually kind and that’s always appreciated in the blog world.

Turning her toddler’s developing speech into a round of Jeopardy, finding out her innocent little son is ratting her out on all of their shopping trips and fast food lunch excursions, and just the general fun and hijinks that come along with parenthood are examples of some of the entertaining entries you’ll read throughout the five months of archives.

The Antique Mommy is a great writer. Her entries seem more like short stories, and whether the posts have pictures of her adorable son or happen to be about how she and her husband (The Antique Daddy) are adjusting to life with little Sean, they always seem to pull at one heartstring or another. The entries are certainly enjoyable to people that are at all entertained by little kid stories.

My biggest complaint (and I use that word very lightly) is that there aren’t more posts to read. With a little boy who has just turned two, though, I can see how the lack of free time could definitely be a roadblock. Readers should take advantage of the posts that are there and enjoy reading about this sudden change in the Antique Mommy’s life. NULL

Self confessed geeks unite! This blog from the UK is brought to us from another proud “new skool geek” who isn’t afraid to voice his opinion on the hard hitting issues like, what’s on television and why it sucks, 3d engine performance on recently released first person shooters and poorly documented Internet Explorer CSS bugs.

Popular culture is all important for geek kind, and our author lets us into his tech bubble to share his thoughts and ideas on the modern world. Written with true geek egoism, we are enlightened in the Mac vs PC debate and our authors favorite films of all time. I’ll give it to him, he has good taste and a good reviewing style. Again, I wish this blog had more regular updates.

One post in particular struck a chord with me perhaps due to my newly found role as TWR reviewer – “Mindless Blogs” and I quoth “I have a question for these people… WHY THE F**K DO YOU THINK WE GIVE A S**T?!!!” That’s a very good question. A good blog will make us give a s**t, whether we want to or not!

The design is clean and well presented with easy to read text, but the guy is a seasoner web designer so your eyes are in good hands. The New School Geek Cynic is a well written blog for all lovers of popular culture and is not UK-centric either. Worth a visit and with more frequent posts, worth a re-visit.NULL

I must admit I was rather surprised when I saw the title and then compared it to the site. “George’s Employment Blawg”. The title certainly lacks creativity and the first thing that popped into my head was that the site was about a man called George who was going to report on his rather menial job using phrases such as “Fo shizzle” and the like! Thankfully the end result turned out to be one of the most expertly written blogs I have ever encountered!

Georges Employment Blawg (a play on the word “blog” to include the word “law”) covers topics related to the area of employment and is a collaboration between three professionals; George (the founder of the “blawg”), Michael Harris and Catherine Collingwood who happens to be the designer of the site. In my opinion she hasn’t done a bad job of it. The colour scheme works well and while there are Google Ad’s present, they are placed in a position where they don’t get in the way of you reading the content.

The content itself is (as I’ve said earlier) related to everything employment but slanted more towards the legal aspects in it’s case studies. It also reports findings from other sites which almost makes it an essential portal for existing lawyers and wannabe lawyers. Now the word “lawyer” may scare away the average Joe Soap who may be expecting to be bombarded with a load of legal mumbo-jumbo but surprisingly this isn’t the case and everything is explained in an easy to follow manner.

If you are part of the workforce and are interested in the implications of lawsuits amongst other companies/corporations then I would highly recommend this blog. If you do happen to be unemployed then I would still recommend the blog for it’s incredible insights!NULL

I had no idea what to expect venturing onto the domain of EdgarAndEllen.com. After reading the first couple of posts, I realized that I was clearly missing out on who Edgar and Ellen are by not watching their television series. With the help of Wikipedia and all of the information available on this weblog’s main site, I learned more than I could have imagined. Edgar and Ellen are the main characters in a series of children’s books written by Charles Ogden. The two namesakes of this site are children that spend time in a cemetery with the likely spooky company that one would expect.

When the site loads, a design comes up that has tweaked to show pictures of Edgar and Ellen in the header image and to make the site appear a bit more spooky than the standard WordPress template would. The site is easy to navigate and easy on the eyes, both much appreciated features of a weblog. It uses a two-column layout and the creators of this site keep the additional information in the sidebar to a minimum. Readers and fans can order the books or find out where to download Podcasts. They can also send Edgar and Ellen e-cards or play games involving the characters of these stories.

The site is fairly new. Appropriately enough, the blog portion of the site only rolled out a couple of days following Halloween. The updates come somewhat frequently and make an attempt to encourage reader feedback via the comments portion of each post.

It became clear to me that this site is geared towards people that watch Edgar and Ellen. Having never seen the show, I was unable to participate in the posts that pose questions about how one might interact with the title characters or what readers think about particular aspects of the show.

Blogs are becoming very popular. We all know that. In this case, the creators of the EdgarAndEllen.com site have opted to use a blog for viewer and fan interaction, rather than a message board. This may be something that takes off for other fan-related type sites in the future.

For now, this site is a must visit for those that follow the show. Those folks that know about this show will immediately add it to their list of bookmarks to be updated on all of the upcoming activity related to the show.
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