An Irish viewpoint and communist symbolism. These are two things that would make an ordinary weblog unique, yet selfishly both appear on Tom Cosgrave’s website.
Tom’s site offers everything you could want of a good weblog: an original perspective, a clear design, and a good writing style. And with archives stretching back to April of 2000, there’s plenty o’ content, if you’ll excuse the atrocious pun.
As an experiment, I looked back at the very early days of the site. Call it research if you will, but I consider this part of an ongoing experiment: to see if, given time, a weblog can truly mature. And it looks like here, at least, it can. The writing style has improved gradually with time, it has been refined and bettered with each rotation of the Earth, and it is good to see. It should also be encouraging for the countless websites I have disparaged at TWR: give it time and you will all get better. Maybe.
There’s no doubting it, Tom is a very talented person. The communism symbolism that decorates the site is very effective, and the fact that it is empty symbolism will appease over-serious readers. The avoidance of an obvious and inherently cliche’d Irish-inspired design is also a pleasant surprise; the blog would have been entirely less palatable if it had been in black and white or all green.tomcosgrave.com