Rick’s Alternate Reality certainly is alternate to my reality! It’s quite an unsettling first impression with the strange virtual reality images that form the banner on the site being strange and so large that, combined with the blogspot advertising, the text starts right at the bottom of my window. With no background information available on the author or the site you have to dive straight into the blog, but this is not always a bad thing so I just scrolled down and started reading.
The weblog itself has been running since June 2003 and is fairly well written. Unfortunalety, the content is mostly of a personal nature and the style is not engaging enough to hold my attention to the end of longer posts so I didn’t find much here that was to my liking. Rick has not posted much in the last couple of months and not at all in the last 27 days which is a long time for a blogger, but understandable in this case as he has a new baby competing for his attention!
There isn’t much in the way of design here as a blogspot template has been used and the banner images are taken from another site. The colours are well chosen for making the text easy to read but don’t really add anything other than this air of practicality.
Other than that, there’s not much else here. There’s a link to some photos but these are all personal shots that don’t hold much interest if you don’t know the guy personally. Perhaps if I could really get into the blog, as a regular reader I would be more interested. There are also a few links to friends’ sites and some other interesting places on the web which may be worth checking out.
In his first post where he tries to define the purpose of his new blog, Rick says “Did I just confuse the hell out of you?”. My answer to this now is an emphatic yes, but with a little work this might not be the case. Weblogs are very subjective and there are probably many people out there who could find something in this site now, but I think that with a bit more thought and more frequent posting there could be a wider audience out there for this one in the future.Rick’s Alternate Reality