Fringe Blog has a nice white background with a centered column that looks like a piece of paper. Nothing cluttering the sides, very easy on the eyes. I wish more blogs looked like this one.
In the About section I found that our author is 23 years old and wants to be a film editor when he grows up. He’s serious about it too, because he has won a few awards already in local film festivals.
I browsed through the archives, which start in February of 2003. Here is a quote from his first entry:
“The Grand Experiment
February 8
I’ve gone and done it. I’ve finally succumbed to the pressures of life in the digital universe. I’m not talking about starting up a dotcom (I already did that).
Blogging. Blog. Blogger. I am Jack’s Lack of Good Sense. What makes me think I can keep this up? What makes me think people care? Is it for the people that I make daily reports and maintain my independence, all the while drumming up thoughts on…whatever?”
These are all questions we bloggers asked ourselves when we first stepped into the blogosphere. Will anybody care? Blogging is a leap of faith there is no doubt about it. And our author found that his own motivations and the direction of his blog evovled as he went along, which is documented on the about page.
The entries are surprisingly mature considering the age of the author. He is articulate and has wide ranging interests that keep the posts from becoming mundane. He does movie reviews, posts chapters from his ongoing novel, takes a trip down memory lane about Garbage Pail Kids trading cards, discusses politics, and links freely to other blogs that he reads. I especially enjoyed the recurring Zen teaching posts.
I found something new to me on this blog…. something called the Christian Carnival, which seems to be a roving venue for bloggers to post essays on certain topics of interest. Our author was the recent host. Twenty bloggers participated. I also ran across something called The Storyblogging Carnival that is a site to submit a story that you have posted on your blog. This sounded like fun to me, and I am happy to have learned about it.
The author has an efficient style for his archives. They are listed by month and only include a brief paragraph and then a go to link for the full entry. It was easy to browse through the excerpts to find things you might be interested in reading. While I don’t care for the “read more” links on the main page of a blog, it worked surprisingly well for the archives.
I enjoyed my visit, and was impressed by the variety and depth of the writing. While there is a fair amount of strong political opinion here, it is far from ranting. And since politics is not necessarily the dominant theme, I think this blog would appeal to a wide audience.