My first impressions of “Malibu” were good ones – she has her own domain name, an MT blog with different skins to choose from and some “About Me” stuff to get people started off with.
The templates (about seven in all) seemed to work well and look good, and it was nice that she had differentiated the ones suitable for lower resolutions. After browsing through them all, I ended up settling on the “Cat” one and then had a look round to see what there was in the way of other extras. I was quite pleased that there wasn’t too much junk in the sidebars, which seems to find its way in to a lot of blogs. There were simply the usual archives (by category or date), recent comments and two different “About Me” pages. I found the traditional “About Me” more interesting and in depth than the “Alpha-Bio”, but both were informative and helpful nevertheless. Looking through the archives, it seems that she used to have a photoblog and had removed it for one reason or another, which I felt was a shame as this also meant that a lot of the pictures in her archive postings were non-existent too. I always like nosing through a good Photoblog!
So on to the content, and one little niggle I had straight away was the spelling. Now I don’t usually bother to point out the odd spelling mistake or typo in a review, but unfortunately with this weblog it did affect my reading enjoyment somewhat, and in some cases it was difficult to work out what was being said. I know it can be a pain in the arse to put all our postings through a spell checker, but on the other hand a lot of the errors Malibu had could have been resolved simply by reading through the entry first, before posting it up. Ok, lecture over.
Generally speaking this is a personal weblog which doesn’t shine in any areas particularly, but is nevertheless an enjoyable read overall. There are some good personal posts as well as the usual quizzes and links to interesting news sites and such. Although Malibu tends to give herself a hard time for not updating regularly (though there is plenty of content here) or providing (what she considers to be) interesting content, there are some good posts to be found all the same. The ones I enjoyed the most were the longer, more personal ones about her father’s difficulties, the problems and successes she has had with work and her angst about relationships. This meatier stuff is always worth a read in my opinion, though it probably makes me some kind of emotional leech, thriving off people’s misfortunes and dramas in life. Oh well. The point I am making is that there are certainly some areas which show promise here, and if maybe she continued working on these, she might not feel so bad about her blogging abilities.
Overall then I enjoyed my time here and the site certainly has the potential for a bright future. Hopefully the author will, in time be able to relax in to her role as blogger a little more and the blog will then really start to thrive.
malibu