My first thought before I entered The Anchor Song was, “What the heck am I going to find here?” I have never heard of an anchor song so I was a little confused. So with some confusion in mind, I dove into the site.
Now I don’t know what people’s fascination is with splash pages, but I do not like them. There is not a purpose for them. This one is a hand drawn sketch of a person, presumably the author. Clicking on the little guy takes us to the simplistic designed blog. The text is in the center of the screen with an image of a partial man under water. Ok. Not quiet sure if that goes back to that anchor man thing or not.
The first post I read was this one which was a very graphic adult posting about the author being with another male. Since I wasn’t expecting this kind of post, nor the level of detail, I was confused yet again.
Reading through the posts you really start to get a feel for who the author is, his friends and other people in his life. Almost all the posts are of the “this is what I did” type, but are told very well. Each post has a high level of detail which is amazing. I really got into how some people were just called by the first letter of their name (J for instance) while others had their full name. My impression after reading through almost all the posts was that the people who just had a one letter name were done so to protect them which I found to be a nice gesture.
My absoulte biggest complaint about this site is the lack of navigation support. Well let me clarify. In order to navigate to any part of the site (About, Contact, or Archives) you must select it from the small little drop down in the last post on that page. Trying to read the archives in Firefox is not going to happen and will result in a 404 error. To write this I had to go into IE and view it. I should note that the archives work fine in Safari for the mac. Not sure what causes this problem, but it is a huge one.
The navigation needs to be changed. This site has a great story to tell but it is ruined by the fact that you almost have to take 2 steps back for every one forward. I have changed the category from personal to adult as I believe that only adults will really get the author in addition to some graphic details of things. Overall I enjoyed reading The Anchor Song, but was disappointed by the lack of navigation. As far as what The Anchor Song refers to, my only guess is that it is referring to Sailors, but I could be wrong.
The Anchor Song