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