I am always a little hesitant when I see the title of a weblog being so-and-so’s weblog/diary/online journal/etc… But with Michael’s Online Journal I was pleasantly surprised.
Upon first loading the page I was given a dark gray background with white and blue text. There are borders around each section (Title/logo area, the navigation, and of course the blog). The design is very simplistic, but works very well.
The blog itself is somewhat interesting. At first I could not get into the blog as most of the posts are very short. But I kept on reading post after post after post, and around page 4 (which happens to be about a week ago’s posts) I got into the short posts. As it turns out, I liked the short posts. They are to the point, which is something I have not seen in a long time and was fresh.
There are only two minor disappointments with the site. Michael has a Javascript thing to put a message in the status bar. The entire time it is saying “Press F11 for full-screen mode”. It basically eliminates the status bar and some other stuff. It is unnecessary to view the site in full screen mode and seems somewhat pointless for me to do. The other problem I had was there was not an “about me” page. Sure I figured stuff out about Michael from his posts, but I would like to have it all in one area as he has posted a lot about himself anyways.
But just because there are bad things, doesn’t mean there aren’t good things. One thing that I liked was there was a fader between pages. I am sure this is an IE only thing as I remember it back with FrontPage 5 years ago. Another nice option is to turn on “Blog-only” which just gives you the blog and not all the side bar stuff. This is nice if you have a small resolution or if you just want to ignore all of the navigation stuff.
Overall we have a good weblog. It is above average, and should have a good following if it doesn’t already. The multiple short posts each day make you want to visit the site multiple times.
Michael’s Online Journal