I am not the intended audience for this blog. I am not someone who views herself as “progressive,” and I feel the term in and of itself is rather cliché anymore. But I did enjoy the Progressive Wednesday blog for a lot of reasons. Let me tell you why.
Founders Eric and Matt have put together a website filled with “to-do’s, talk, and tools to get America over the hump.” I’m presuming the “hump” is the Bush Administration, viewed by many to be the long-doldrummy Wednesday of our collective soul.
Each Wednesday they have a feature article. These articles encompass Coral Reef Endangerment, Wind Power, Porn, Wal-Mart and their efforts to take over the planet, Darfur, The Fast Food Nation, Niagara Falls, and many other topics that the editors feel need our attention. Each Wednesday article is succinct, focuses on a topic, and lists ways you as the reader can make a difference. The Wednesday articles are not the only content on the site. Every day someone from their volunteer team is contributing an article into the blog on topics ranging from Family to Religion. They have an active staff of people spanning many different decades in age, but each person is passionate about their shared and individual philosophies.
The site is constantly updated. It is great to read a blog that I had to actually spend time with in order to formulate an opinion on in order to review. The archives go back to February, 2007 and there is a lot of content to read through. So often we receive sites at TWR to review that have six entries. I have to take a second and thank Progressive Wednesday for having more than a spattering of entries upon which to write a review (tips hat in thanks towards the staff).
I enjoy that the staff, while all different people with different philosophies and backgrounds, all seem to be pointing in the same direction. A lot of times I read a community or group blog and I wonder… what is the cohesive thread that MAKES this a group blog? This group is a team and not just a random assemblage of people who feel like writing on the web.
The look and feel of the site is very basic but works very well. The header graphic changes with the Wednesday article and carries through the site for the rest of the week. The navigation makes perfect sense, and their custom logo is really good.
There are a few things I don’t like about the site. The template of the site is bigger than my screen, which is running 1024×768. The right side of the screen is chopped off by about an inch (ie: the magnifying glass of the search box is cut off, the Flickr photo section title says “One Photo Of Ou Beautiful Worl†. It isn’t a BIG problem, but I think it should be massaged to make it so everything fits.
Another thing that I didn’t like which took me some time to figure out is that if I click back on the archive calendar to go back to July, the July page which appears does not have a calendar on it to take me back to June. There are several pages for July’s archive, but even on the first page of the July archive (navigating back using the “Previous Entries†link at the bottom of the pages) shows that it just isn’t there. This surprised me at first, but thanks to the search box, I punched in a few months and was able to find the very first posting in February of 2007 so I could progress forward through the site. Which seemed a lot easier. Plus, I like reading forward in time instead of backward. A consistent monthly calendar would be great, not sure if July’s is the only one missing or not, but found the calendar on other month’s pages like March, so it may just be a code oversight.
Additionally, there were places where links launch a new window but on the same page, no new window is launched. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. And I hate when new windows are launched randomly, for no reason.
On the Columns page, many of the links are incorrectly linked, and launched column sections that didn’t belong to the title (ie: Carey Mack’s pocket links to TGIF movie review. TGIF movie review links to Twin Cities… etc).
The February 28th Wednesday Article on Porn is filled with content errors for the footnote section. Lots of endif statements and supportFootnote statements. I do have to commend them for footnoting in the first place though, seeing as a lot of the blogs I’ve read recently don’t cite anyone or anything, which annoys me to no end. My guess is it is an easy fix, and they can clean up those errors easily.
As I mentioned at first, I am probably not the intended audience for this blog. But, at Progressive Wednesday, I didn’t feel attacked, slighted, insulted or otherwise fingerpointed at by any of the articles I read. I think the writing is honest, and the message is clear. The world is a wonderful place, worth investing effort in, and that individuals can make changes with themselves that make changes in the world. I give Progressive Wednesday a 3.75 and would recommend it to anyone looking to read well-written socially-conscious materials on the web.
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