The Weblog Review

Dismissing this blog because it’s on an overused blogspot template or because it seems as if it’s primarily links to news stories is a mistake. If you do that, you might miss the “vacation” link that opens up to beautiful pictures of Jak’s vacation in British Columbia.



As for the blog itself, there’s nothing out of the ordinary in most of what he writes about. It’s primarily the writer’s observations on top news stories or stories he finds interesting. He rarely delves very deep, and I think that’s a mistake because his writing about personal issues is much more interesting. His post “Why do men still tip their barbers?” is quite interesting, in fact. But I had to muddle through a lot mediocre posts to get there. It’s not that the other posts are bad, it’s just that they’re not particularly unique.



He also has links to his other blogs on the arts, religion and paleo-anthropology. Again, they are primarily links and his observations on them. I’m not sure if he’s given up on these because two of them haven’t been updated since late September; the other on October 21.



His writing, however, is very easy to read. I think he would be best served by giving us more personal stories, and more photography.

Jak’s Blog

The first thing I noticed about this weblog is its stark appearance. I assume he was going for the less is more look, but in this case I think less really is less.



Aside from that, I really enjoyed Nik’s writing style. He draws you in and makes you want to read more to get to know him. He doesn’t shy away from writing about extremely personal things. For example, he writes about a girl he did hook up with but shouldn’t have, and a girl he wants to start a relationship with but can’t. There’s also a lot of stream of consciousness writing, which really works at getting the reader into his head.



I like the way his “pointless submenu” is set up. Included in this are Nik’s about me/about this site page; list of archive titles, which include “being cute versus being hot;” “things I wish I would have said;” “believing in love;” and “eating at subway;” and a section on what graphics program and fonts he uses and why.



Nik says he’ll be updating only semi-periodically, and hasn’t posted since Oct. 31, but I think his wit, insight and observations of a 20-year-old college student make his posts worth the wait.

designpunk

My first response when the page loaded was what the heck is going on here? Big green table that acts as a logo of sorts and below that a bunch of links. Then below that some random stuff, then the weblog entries by each date. The design of the site is very lacking, and looks like it was created by a WYSIWYG editor.



So I look around the site a little bit, and the entire site at least looks the same. Again, I kept saying, there is something wrong with the design of this site.



So finally I started clicking on the weblog links that were listed by date. Seeing as the site has only been around since July, I started at the very beginning to see how the weblog has evolved.



Here is what I found. I found a new to the web user who was writing about her SOHO experiences with building and maintaining the website. I also found that she was using Front Page. That explains a lot of the design issues. I hope that I am correct in that the author doesn’t use a blog tool like Big Blog Tool or Blogger, but rather, writes each page daily, in Front Page and then uploads it. At the bottom of each of her posts are links back and next, with some of the links being broken, but at least there was a directory link also that I could click on to find the next post.



The entries, unlike the design and layout of the site, were very good. I was very interested in what was going on with the site and the building of it and what not. She also throws her opinion into things, which made reading them even more enjoyable. Also, the updates are frequent, about one a day, and of good length.



If you are starting a small business or have one and are looking at putting it on the web, this is a definite read. If the site gets redesigned and fixes the broken links, it will be a much better site overall. But don’t get let a design stop you from reading a good weblog.

Diary of a Mad Web Lackey

Besides the screaming lack of an “about”

page, and the obscenely narrow column

where she crams the long-winded entries,

the negative points are very few.



Now, when I say long-winded, I don’t mean

boring–quite the contrary–the subject

matter is interesting, coherent, and well

thought-out. Did I mention humorous? She’s

funny, too.



Few nifty links, but a lot of good writing.

Well worth checking out, and possibly

worthy of routine, daily reading.Daily Cup of Tea

“The Simple Weblog” isn’t a simple as the title might like it to be. It uses (and abuses) CSS quite a bit, and includes a rather large (200K) animated gif on the front page. I would have liked to have read some more of the site, but the navigation didn’t work on my PC, and downright crashed my Mac.



The content that I was able to read was good, though, with some very interesting links, and good descriptions of where the link went, encouraging me to follow them. A bit of humor, and some fine link digging are positive points here.



Once the bugs are worked out, that huge graphic fades to the archives, and the navigation becomes functional (so the archives are available), the blog shows some promise.The Simple Weblog