The Weblog Review

When I sat down today to do my review, the title of the blog I was going to delve into gave me an unsure feeling about what I was going to be reading. “Flirty Kitty” conjured up visions of the stereotypical flighty high school girl who was going to prattle on about her latest crush, her clothes, her clique of friends, and other things that I wouldn’t be able to identify with at all.

Boy, was I wrong

When I opened the page, my preconceived notions were automatically voided by the header, “The Misadventures Of Erotic Writer Tara Alton”. My interest was automatically piqued and I jumped into the blog with both feet.

The blog layout is the standard blogger template which, honestly, isn’t important to me at all if the content of the weblog is great – which this one is. The fact that a ganeric blogger template is used quickly becomes a null and void fact once you start reading.

The blog is written by the afore-mentioned “Tara Alton”, a fascinating woman from Michigan who is an erotic writer by night and a corporate travel agent by day. She tells hilarious tales of her daily life and she literally had me laughing out loud at points. She has the incredible talent of making even the most mundane of events entertaining, and it’s a skill too often lost on many bloggers.

She talks about her workplace, with co-workers like Crazy Jane (whose sole goal in life is to own a hot-dog cart). She talks about her pets – who with names like Miss Smarty Pants and Fiona take on a life seemingly all their own. She talks about her erotic writing (which can be sampled from a link on her page… which, incidentally, is great). She talks about her incredible crush on, of all things, a cupcake. She talks of and shows pictures of her Barbie collection doing things and having the life she only dreams of. This, and so much more, is what makes up the charming and ever-so-quirky personality of the author. Maybe it is because of my own eccentricities, but I immediately connected with this author and found myself ridiculously disappointed when I came to the last of her entries.

I found the blog to be an immensely entertaining and engrossing read, and it’s actually going to make it to my personal list of frequently visited sites. My hat’s off to the author for an exceptional read and you have now garnered yourself a loyal fan. It is for this reason, I give Flirty Kitty my first perfect 5/5.Flirty Kitty

The Transplant possesses a header that for some strange reason brought to mind the Soviet Union when first I laid eyes on it. I cannot explain, I only report my first impression.

The three column page is more cluttered than I like to see, and is overloaded with blogrolls, tootsierolls, and other rolls. And I have never understood the “recent posts” and “recent comments” lists on blogs. Because most of the time those very same posts appear on the page already. Redundancy is annoying.

I checked into the About page and found out very little about the author, except a list of things he is not. Which does narrow down the possibilities, but did very little to enlighten me.

I plowed through the archives in search of our author. Who is he? And what does he want to tell us?

I encountered some very curious entries. Sometimes I had no idea what he was writing about. Even after reading the post two times over, I was left scratching my head. There are a LOT of links. Nay, at times there are absurd numbers of links. And often when you click on them, they lead to obscure bits of unsatisfying factoids. With one notable exception. I was amused and bemused by this link and enjoyed my visit there: http://www.utilikilts.com/ Please, check it out.

As to writing style, I think our author has a certain talent. But so often the cryptic nature of the topic under discussion just tripped me up.
Occasionally however there were lucid moments, and those were quite pleasant. Our author seems quite well read, and I think is making literary allusions from time to time, but they are so vague as to be useless to the average reader. Either that, or he is writing an aside to himself, and only he would understand his tongue in cheek monologue.

I read virtually everything on this blog and found myself WANTING to “get” our author, and feeling that if he would just ratchet down the obscure nature of his writing style, I would be able to connect.

It’s a curious place here at the Transplant. Very curious indeed.

The Transplant

Musings of a Caffeinated Mind was quite interesting. I found that it fulfilled my expectations in some senses, but not in others.

Let’s go over the obvious.

It’s a blogger website with a comment system from HaloScan. Everything works. We have personal links, former posts, a decent design, and a profile. Everything looks good.

The weblog itself focuses on a few different things. We have Scenes from the Forklift (about his job), Boring Childhood Stories (self-explanatory), Analyze This (about his dreams), and Photo of the Week.

I found his work stories to be very entertaining, and his Photos of the Week are very good. I read a couple of his dream stories, I find them hilarious, and sometimes just plain off the wall. The childhood stories were ok, but that’s a minute point.

One thing that the author writes about a lot is sports. (Did I mention he’s from Canada?) And like any Canadian, he’s in love with hockey. Can you blame him? I don’t. Bloggers write about what they know and love, and since I knew nothing about hockey (though I love to watch it), I found his articles about the sport informative.

In conclusion, the reason I didn’t give this blog a 5 was that his design is one that I’ve seen everywhere (probably because it’s blogger), but nevertheless, I always like to see a more custom look. Another thing is that it may not have been quite quirky enough to give the blog title justice. But with that being said (I hope as constructively as possible) all in all, the author has a very good thing going. Go Canada.

Musings of a Caffeinated Mind

Princess Joanna’s Kingdom opens to a pleasant blue and white page with nice readable fonts and a clean and not too cluttered sidebar. I did not find the about me page she said she was working on, and perhaps I did my review while she was updating it. In any case, it was not present.

Joanna has been here since March 2003. I read samples from each of the archived months and found entries talking about her job, what mood she was in, and what her plans were for the weekend. While the writing style is understandable and clear, the subject matter is rather mundane and not that interesting. Now I know that there are days in every writer’s life that we find ourselves at a loss for something meaningful to say. But at some point, at least in this blogger’s opinion, one has to show some deep emotion or reveal one’s passion for some aspect of life in order for the writing to be engaging.

A couple of constructive suggestions for improvement would be to step outside the immediate things in your life, and write a bit more about the wider world. And tell us what you are passionate about, the positive or the negative. Don’t let your writing be ordinary. Just writing down the facts of the day, with a side of whine does not make for interesting reading in the long run.

At this point, the target audience for this blog would be people personally aquatinted with the author. If you want to reach a larger audience, tell us what makes you tick. Or let us see your unique view of the world. That would make me want to come back and visit again sometime.

Princess Joanna’s Kingdom

Visually the site, Demob Happy Teacher, is simple. It is a slightly modified blogger template which I’m sure you have seen before. The colors are a soothing combination of greens. The blog is written by a teacher named Jenny who resides in lovely Wrexham, Wales, United Kingdom. The earlier blog entries are mostly about her experiences in teaching and other work related issues, more recent entries are much less work related and accessible for a broader audience. Her non-teaching topics include her garden, dog, her driving angst with the Runcorn Bridge, computers (the entry entitled ‘computers!!’ was rather funny), aging (and honest reflection on aging), spiders (big ones to by the looks of it – eek!) sheep and her experimentation with blogger code.

Jennytc seems like a good natured, fun person, and this character is reflected in her writing. Most of the entries are pretty light hearted and maintain a light, somewhat humorous tone. This is best exemplified in her entries about the many spider
invasions. ‘They’ve been reading my blog – they must have been, and now they’re ganging up on me. It’s an organised assault – on my nerves! This morning’s specimen had quietly insinuated itself into the bedroom. There it hung, swaying slightly, on the bedroom ceiling, grinning triumphantly – well it probably was. I didn’t actually get close enough to pick up on facial expressions.. The entry ‘Find your perfect mate :)’ (which is also highly recommended) is also funny. I enjoyed going through the photos she has in her photoblog section. Sheep are funny. BahhhHHH…

The author seems to really enjoy blogging. Her enthusiasm comes through in her many stories (she is now touring France) and observations about life. The blog is amusing and expressed in an open and honest manner. Clearly as Jennytc continues with her html experimentation I’m sure there will be various changes and improvements to the site. I’m not a big fan of a bunch of unconnected links and different looking banners on the sidebar. It seems Jennytc recently added a bunch of them… such as the weather pixie, phase of the moon, clock, weather and quotes. I just find it makes a site look kitschy unless you can tie them together somehow it makes a site look very inconsistent visually.

Overall an enjoyable read. I’m sure most readers would find something enjoyable reading Demob Happy Teacher. A great spirit, I’m curious as to where it will taker her.

Demob happy teacher