The Weblog Review

I knew going into this review that it would be focused more at the computer geeks and those of us who have been around the internet for a while. I knew this because the author calls his site a GeekLog and I just had this feeling that it wouldn’t be targeted at other forms of geeks (star wars, star trek, convention going people).

When the page first loaded I was greeted with a post from September. This scared me as I thought I was reviewing a site that hadn’t been updated since then. This post actually serves as a welcome post than anything else. After reading the entire site, I am not sure if this post is warranted to be at the very front. But I will discuss more on that later.

The design of the site is a three column layout with a lot of info on the sidebars. All of the info is your standard blog info; polls, recently posted, things of this nature. When I got to the bottom of the site I noticed that this blog was powered by geeklog. Now I find out that geeklog is actually blogging software and not some creative name for the site. I liked it better when I thought Mr. Maggoo was being creative with the naming of his blog.

The posts are of a technical sort. But they are also of a personal nature. Recent posts talk about a program he has been working on at work that is unfortunately not going to get patented and the process that has been working up to this. Other posts talk about security issues and things going on at the university he works at. The frequency of these posts is not often unfortunately. I wish he would update more often, but I am sure he is busy. I know this site used to have more posts, but a server crash caused the author to lose a lot of posts.

Overall this site is pretty average. With a higher frequency of posts I am sure that this site could blossom. I think Mr Maggoo is trying to figure out where he wants to take his blog and thus his postings are happening less often. There is potential for this site to become a really good read. If this is a goal the author has, then I hope he flexes his blogging muscles and focuses on his blog.

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The first thing I noticed when I got to A Shout in the Dark was the background of the page. There’s an image of a laptop, and the text (that’s directly over the image, with no sort of blogbox to make it easier to read) is white. Typically I’m not too fond of having to highlight text in order to read it.

Once I get to reading the entries, they’re fairly concise. I wouldn’t call them posts so much as articles, however; the author (Charles) seems to take random items of news, tidbits of information, or other facts and strings words together about them. Some have pictures to aid in the visualization of the situation.

The layout, as I mentioned, isn’t very easy to read, and the colors clash a bit. The sidebar is mint green, white, blue, and purple… shades that don’t compliment each other very well. Along with the posts being difficult to read, this is a bit of a setback.

There aren’t many plugins, except for links to different things. Since this is a WordPress blog there are other pages, but they don’t match very well (or, rather, at all) with the blog itself.

This blog just couldn’t catch my interest very well. Between the less-than-user-friendly layout and the posts having little to no consistency as far as relationship goes, I couldn’t really get into this blog at all, and I’m sorry to give it a 1 out of 5.NULL

I didn’t know what a Wogbeast really was when I saw the title of this weblog, but I was very willing to give this site a read to find out. Now, there may be other Wogbeasts out there, but this particular weblog is written by the Disgruntled Wogbeast, or DWB. Thank you, DWB, for providing an acronym.

Readers don’t learn a lot of valid information about DWB. He lives in Wales (which is the United Kingdom, for those of you geographically stupid) and, according to his Blogger profile, he’s a 23-year-old post graduate student.

The first thing I noticed about DWB by reading through this weblog was his sarcasm, and it really sticks out when he uses it. He has a sense of humor that I found hilarious, and that’s probably because it’s much like my own – dry, witty, and sometimes has the tendency to be quite biting. This is probably why I enjoyed his writing.

The site is still young, having only rolled out, from what I can see, in mid-October 2005. Just because he’s new to the blogging world (or perhaps just this particular weblog), he doesn’t waste any time at all before tackling current issues found in the media that some people might tiptoe around. He gives readers some background information into the history of The Church of Scientology, and anyone following the tabloids can appreciate his information on where and how the religion actually began.

DWB just started a new feature with his site – Real Men (or Women) of Genius. This is nothing like the commercialized versions of Bud Light’s Real Men of Genius that show up every once in a while on TV. The first nomination went to Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Peace Prize winner from 1970. Not only does this site get a chuckle from its readers from time to time, but you learn something, too. Not a bad combination for a weblog.

The site’s hosted by Blog*Spot and uses yet another standardized Blogger two-column template. Links of all realms are listed down the right hand side of the weblog’s entries. It’s a very standard black text on white background, which makes the site easy to read and that’s always appreciated.

The Disgruntled Wogbeast is off to a good start. It does a good job of keeping the attention of readers by providing small paragraphs that are well written and straight to the point. If readers are looking to learn something new now and again, and read the posts of someone that can keep them entertained, this is a good place to start. Once this site has established itself and been online long enough to gather a good number of readers, the interaction on these posts will become another pleasurable portion of the site.
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KillJim.com. I can’t explain why, but I really loved that domain name from the second I saw it. The best domain names are ones you do not forget, and I think it would be pretty darn impossible to get something like KillJim.com out of your head.

This starts out to be a group weblog, with the main author of the site inviting people that can contribute to Kill Jim on a regular basis, but winds up being the brainchild of the creator, James. He’s a 20 year old from New Zealand, according to the informational page about the authors of the site.

With only three months of archives listed on the site, there unfortunately aren’t really that many posts to read. Sadly, the humor in most of these posts will probably be lost on some viewers. Not everyone can appreciate James’ excitement about becoming a sniper for the U.S. Army (if he were an American) and popping off the heads of terrorists one by one. And I’m fairly certain there are blog-readers out there who won’t be entertained by the entries written about getting drunk beyond belief and deciding which disco ball he likes the most. Me? I was entertained. Immensely.

Every once in a while, one of the authors will share a link they’ve found on a different site somewhere, but that’s definitely not the main focus of the site. In my opinion, it’s a site that’s made to entertain – short, sometimes eccentric entries that may or may not have a point, and may or may not strike its intended audience as funny.

The design used for KillJim.com fits the site perfectly. No frills, nothing fancy – just a design that does the job. The title of the site is in the upper left-hand corner of the site, with a link to the archives and the authors listed below. James lists a few of his favorite links below, and the rest of the site displays the weblog entries.

This is a site that’s not going to be entertaining for everyone, and a site like that is hard to rate. While this site is not the average mainstream site, it is very well written, complimented with a very nice design. Having said that, it deserves a good ranking like the one I’ve given. NULL

Right away, I knew exactly the type of entries I would read when visiting “Hooah Wife”. In short, the author of the weblog is Greta, who is a very proud military wife. Her posts usually reflect this in some manger.

Blogger powers the site, but Greta’s went to extensive work to stray from the packaged templates that are so ubiquitous. In true military style, the design uses red, white, and blue throughout the layout. She’s chosen a three-column layout, which works nicely for the amount of content she includes. The side columns border the daily entries, and are filled with links, webrings, archives, credits, and anything else you can imagine.

Greta advertises her “new blog” called “Elephant in My Coffee” in May 2005. “Elephant in My Coffee” is a collaborative effort with a couple of other authors, so Greta keeps on plugging away on her own weblog, too.

Random bit of technical info – I read the first two months of posts, feeling bad for the author that there were never any comments left in the earlier months – the comment counter always shows zero comments had been made. It wasn’t until the third months of posts that I finally clicked on the link to leave a comment, where I saw that people are leaving comments – the JavaScript for the Haloscan comments just isn’t showing how many comments are left. At some point through the site, the comments link finally started showing up correctly. Rather odd!

I mentioned earlier that Greta’s posts reflect her position as a military wife. The archives on this site date back to October 2004, shortly before the 2004 Presidential election for the United States. There is not a post that is written from the time the weblog starts to the day of the election that fails to mention why voters should re-elect President Bush. This, of course, could easily turn Democratic voters away from reading anything else, but it seems like the majority of the regular visitors to this site tend to agree with Greta’s political beliefs.

Greta writes about an entire realm of things. Over the past year, many of her posts have been closely related to her husband being deployed to the Middle East. Fortunately, he gets to call and email what seems like somewhat regularly, and it looks like he will be coming back home sometime in the very near future. Reading about Greta’s “temporary single parent life”, as she often puts it, and how she copes with the news coming over form that part of a world definitely gives readers a different look into what we only hear or see in the media.

The opinions expressed on this weblog walk a fine line of being the best thing about it and being the lone thing that deters visitors with differing opinions. Personally, I have just about the exact opposite of political beliefs that Greta has. While I found the constant reaming of the Democratic party to get a little on the tiresome side, I looked back at my own weblog and realized she would probably think the same thing of my opinions.

I would recommend this site for people living in the United States, curious about what really goes on in the personal side of our military. We hear the stories from newspapers and TV, but this gives readers a real insight to what happens behind the scenes with this Hooah Wife and her family. NULL