The Weblog Review

When I first saw the name American Blogger I thought this was going to be about a guy who would be blogging about the war in Iraq. But then I saw that the category he listed was movies instead of politics so I was revealed.

American Blogger is still a very young site being that it just started in April. Additionally the months are not filled with a lot of posts, or more specifically a lot of ranting and raving and general rambling that can be found in a lot of other blogs. Instead the author posts movie reviews, pictures of actresses, and sports information. I was very happy to see that the movie reviews were more than a quick blurb, but also they aren’t long and drawn out giving away every detail of the movie.

The design of the site is a very simple two-column layout like most blogs are now. The header image looks cut off for me on the main page, but works fine for all the archives. This could be some issue with css and the browser I am using (Safari). The other down side to the site is that there is sort of a splash page. It is more of a intro page with links to six different areas of the site, but I still consider it a splash page, and we all should know how I feel about those now (in case you don’t know how I feel, I do not like splash pages).

Back to the weblog itself: when the author does post pictures he is kind enough to send them through some filters and resizing in Photoshop, which is a nice touch. It made me feel like the author actually cared about the content of his site, rather than just throwing random pictures up of actress, sports figures, etc. The only downside I have to the blog is the lack of content. I understand that one cannot possibly see every single movie and write a review about it, but the fact that there are posts about actresses and sports should be able to get enough content for the author.

Overall I thought the concept of American Blogger was a good one and the execution is there too. I do however feel that the content really needs to be kicked up a notch to be really noteworthy. I enjoyed spending my time here and I hope that in time the site improves.American Blogger

American Blogger opens to a very pleasant, atmospheric picture of the prairie. The railroad tracks and stop sign are an amusing way to tell us he thinks he lives in the middle of nowhere. I followed the link to his blog which has been in existence since April of this year. I was impressed by the opening page here too. The color scheme is eye pleasing and the header is a complex, if subtle montage. I started to get excited. This is a really great looking site. Very professional.

But then I started to read the posts. Mercifully, they are short. They consist of terse comments about movies, with very little in the way of commentary. Some entries contain a photo of an actress or model and some salacious comment on same. One link that I regrettably clicked on named “what can brown do for you” took me to a vulgar photo. I did not appreciate the ambiguity of the link. There are other posts on various short subjects such as sports or some odd bit of news that captured the author’s attention that day.

In the sidebar are links to several photo galleries that include family members, “babes”, goofy news photos of improbable events, and scenic views. Some of the pictures in the “Whacky and Funny” folder are pretty fun. But that’s about as much fun that you are going to find on this blog. The author describes his blog in one post thusly: “So you ask what is the purpose of my blog, must there always be a purpose? I know it’s not much, and it certainly won’t make u smarter for reading it, I hope it doesn’t make u stupid either. I just hope that you leave here with a smile.”

I suppose one could argue that blogs don’t have to have a purpose. We could debate that. But I must say, I did not leave with a smile. Perhaps it had something to do with the entry that opened with these words: “So wassup sluts…”

This blog is listed under the “Movie” category. I can’t say that it belongs there except that the author does watch movies, but he certainly doesn’t spend much energy critiquing them.

I won’t be coming back any time soon. The one point I am giving is for the design, which is undeniably quite good. American Blogger

The design of This Full House is weak simply because the left and right sidebars are so prominent that I found it difficult to keep my focus on the actual content. The color scheme, fonts, and font size all seemed a little archaic, and the fonts were generally too large, giving the blog a poor aesthetic quality. Within a few lines of reading, I figured out that the author is a mother and wife and that most of her content is related, if sometimes loosely, to these two topics.

I think you’ll have to be a parent, or at least female, to really appreciate the authors insights and talent. The posts are well-written, but they often relate the mundane aspects of her everyday life, from her dislike of brown rice to nighttime skinny-dipping with her husband. The writing itself is clear and sometimes clever as well. It’s written in an off-the-cuff manner, as if the author is just recording a conversation with a close friend, but the content of the posts is somewhat generic, tired out. It seemed to be the same old parental blog – an outlet for expressing the frustrations and joys of modern family life. However, the author is prolific enough that the reader gets an intimately voyeuristic look into her life and the lives of those in her family.

The layout needs to be tweaked a bit to bring a hierarchy to the content. The sidebars and the main entry column are almost battling for the readers’ attention. Also, the headers above her different groups of links are ambiguous – ‘enjoyed with a strong cup of coffee…’, ‘tossed with a nice crispy salad…,’ and so on. This might just be a pet peeve of mine, but I like to know why the author includes certain links on his or her page and cute ambiguity tells me nothing. The ‘about’ page is a list of 101 things about her. I read about 50 and the items did help describe the author, but I didn’t want to have to read 101 sentences just to find out a little information about her. Another pet peeve: a long list that doesn’t tell me much about you instead of a brief ‘about’ paragraph from which I can decide whether or not we share the same interests. Save the list for a post. Also, the links to The Philosophica Mother, an outside site, didn’t work.

I think you’ll like this site if you’re a parent (the author does get a bit racy at times to spice things up) and the author is a good writer, but I felt the content to be generic and it seemed like a lot of effort went into making the blog cute rather than clever. The rating of 2.5 could get bumped up to 3.5 with a design that focuses the reader on the content better.This Full House

Ugh. Not another family blog. I admit that I have one of my own burried on the web, but that doesn’t mean I want to read them. After all, the point of a family blog is to write for your family and close friends, not for the general public. This is like pulling out your wallet and showing your children’s pictures to complete strangers.

Drooling over super stars, complaining about Martha Stewart, daughter goes through puberty, cats, rain, husband, neighbor stories, online quizzes, yadda yadda yadda. Boring. Boring. Boring.

Even after reading through three months of archives, I’ve yet to know anything about the author that doesn’t relate to one of her children, her husband, or some other person in her daily life. Even her About Me section is lacking and doesn’t really give you much depth into the author. There was little more than basic information presented. The blog content reads like the diary of “what I did today…”

Her attempts at humor fail, she never scratches below the surface of any subject, and her entries seem never ending. And I mean NEVER ENDING. Her lack of interesting subject matter is not helped by the general look or design of the site.

The design is a typical Typepad layout, with the three column layout everyone is always complaining about. The main entry information tends to look squashed in between the two side columns, as if that material is nothing but an after-thought. The text is easy to read (dark green on beige) and the header is unique, but that’s it.

The lacking content could be made more readable if the author were to focus inward and share with us who she is behind who she presents to us. She needs to cut more to the point and not drag the reader through endless unimportant information while getting her point across. There is nothing that makes this blog stand out. This is your typical Mom Blog and even I (a mother who blogs) didn’t care for it.

The author is a bit older than the “typical” blog author and I admire that she has undertaken this task. The world needs more experienced bloggers to help us fill the corners of the Internet left vacant by the teen drama blogs that we encounter all too often. However, she needs to work on what she says and how she says it. This is not a site I would be interested in revisiting any time soon.
This Full House

With a name like Future Hootenanny Overload I was sure this was going to be a “redneck” type website. Someone who just wun themselvs a knew comfuser thingamob and they were going to tell all of us what it was like being a redneck. Boy was I wrong.

Upon entering Future Hootenanny Overload I was greeted with what I thought was a splash page. But then I realized I could scroll down. This fake splash page has some rather large images, a brief bio about the author (how he lives on another planet, is an alien, etc), and then some more information about the site.

After scrolling down through the two pages of above stuff, I finally got to the blog. The blog is a Q and A type blog where people write into Mystic Hooligan (the author) and he answers them from an alien’s perspective. The site is broken down into categories: Spot a Human, Celebrity Deaths, Ask an Alien, Myth Busting, and more. My personal favorite was the Celebrity Death Requests as I thought these were very funny.

The design of the site could be improved. The two pages I have to scroll down no matter what page I am viewing, gets annoying quickly. The page is a two-column layout with all the links on the right. Normally I complain if I can’t see the archives in a date format and only in a category format, but this is the first site that it works for. It would still be nice however to get them in date format.

Overall I enjoyed my time at this blog. There are some things that the site could improve on (the design, getting rid of the two pages that I have to scroll down) but in general this site was worth visiting. I plan to come back to this site any time I need a good laugh.Future Hootenanny Overload