This is going to sound awful, but I just don’t get this site. I’ve looked at it half a dozen times, and tried reading through it each time. There’s not much that keeps my attention and the only reason I keep coming back is because I just can’t give up on a site. Ever.
The layout of the site probably one reason I struggle with visiting it. I suppose by subscribing to the many, many RSS feeds this site has, I could avoid the abomination of a design that greets me as the URL loads. Everything is set on a white background, but there are so many tables and links and different text sizes and colors that the site design really distracts from the main purpose of the site. There are ads all over the site. Between the links Robin lists down the sidebar, I can’t tell which ones are ads and which ones are actually part of this site.
There were a few links down the sidebar under the heading of “About this Siteâ€, but none of them worked. The link where I could find out about the author was available, so I gladly gave it a quick read through. Robin Good sounds like an impressive person. His credentials are noteworthy, and his experience runs the gamut with anything from radio broadcasting to computer graphics. Obviously, Robin has a lot of knowledge in several different arenas due to his experience, giving him the credibility to write about quite a bit of information.
The archives are listed by the subject of each post or by category. While on a regular weblog that would sound extremely cumbersome and annoying to have to scroll through, it’s not as bad as it could be on this site. The posts do begin in March 2000, but thankfully, for readers trying to look through this entire list, sometimes the author of this site goes sometimes up to a month without posting. He does make up for the infrequency in posts by sometimes posting up to six or seven times on one day.
All of this rambling about the site and I still haven’t began to touch the actual content of the weblog. I think that’d because it’s hard to find.
If you click on an individual archive link, you’re taken to the page that features the article. This article is sandwiched in between two sets of Google ads, with links below it selling books from Amazon.com. It made finding the beginning and end of each individual post a bit tedious and more time consuming than it should have been to just read one or two paragraphs.
I did not read every post. With five years of archives, I think I’m entitled to skip a few. In 2000, when the weblog first rolls out, the author doesn’t seem to be dropping much effort into the posts. Generally, it’s a link to an internet-related site – perhaps a search engine of sorts or a site the gives guidelines of some type – followed by a small paragraph that describes what you’ll be reading. Not too much creativity and not a whole lot of effort, in my opinion.
Then, in 2001, there were multiple paragraphs. It seemed as if the author realized what he was starting was potentially a big thing and began to develop things a bit more. He ranks instant messaging programs or dives into the secret world that is Google. Back in 2001, Google was nowhere near the powerhouse it is today, so it was a fun read to go back and read about the perks Google had four years ago.
Basically, this is a site that links to other sites on the web. The author sometimes graces us with very informative paragraphs about the particular products, services, or news articles he’s linking to. Other times, we only get one or two sentences, which are followed up by a link explaining even more at another URL.
The people that will find this site interesting will be the people that like the changes in technology, reading the new findings, or discovering the next cool thing that becomes available online. It’s hard to give this site a high ranking due to it’s awkwardness. It is a very focused weblog and should fall into the “geek†niche very nicely. It just doesn’t jump out, grab me, and make me want to come back over and over again.NULL