Drifting Castles is a weblog written by Kara, a 16 year-old girl attending high school. As she states, “God only knows what I’m going to study when I go off to college.” This is her own personal weblog where she in general just plainly rambles about her life and the world in general. There is this oil pastel drawing as a banner at the top of the page, and it looks vaguely like a castle. One cannot help but wondering what this has to do with her site, whether or not she made it herself.
Kara describes herself as “I’m a golfer and competetive [sic] swimmer, a slight perfectionist, I love to read, and clothes are my passion.” While she has just recently begun writing in this weblog, she keeps it up-to-date, mostly with short to medium-sized entries, but when she gets going she can produce quite a flood of words. Kara writes a lot, has much to say. Tons of activities keep her busy, and it is a wonder she has any time left over at all to write her daily entries. They are mostly about her and the events center on her own thoughts, from highlighting hair, golf lessons, feeling frustrated and confused, that kind of thing.
Often enough, girl problems pop up. One especially entertaining entry is about how her bra strap snaps off, just before classes, and she has to search all over the place for a safety pin, or having her cell phone go off accidentally at school where they are banned and she risks grave punishment (it rings in the middle of her chemistry class during an experiment).
Another example: “…have been doing mock trial work. The freaky thing is that I get such a high off this stuff – having to work fast and being under stress and just having fun… it’s awesome.”
One point requiring attention is the small font size that makes it difficult reading at times, especially for the longer entries. However, the overall design is pleasing enough, with overlapping windows for links, bio, archives and even a so-called tagboard where one can enter messages directly. (I tried it with a simple “Nice site you have” but for some got the message “Error: no vulgarity”). In her archives there are a couple of missing graphics (placeholders show up).
This weblog is not a bad start and building up the momentum as it has this year should lead to quite a collection of stories by Kara. This is worth the read, especially for other teenagers of that age. Perhaps she can enlighten us on why she chose the title of Drifting Castles.Drifting Castles