The Weblog Review

Oh wow. Prepare yourself for nothing but raving.

The site design was absolutely gorgeous! The colors all went together well, and the functionality of everything was very easy to figure out and worked wonderfully throughout the site.

I visited the “sounds” portion of the website, and downloaded on of the available mp3 tracks that were available. And once again, I just continued to be impressed with the quality of everything about this site. It’s hard to appreciate covers of some of your favorite songs, but when they’re done as splendidly as they are here, it makes you all the happier.

The photo gallery of the site just continues to add to the brilliant things that you’ll continue to find. The pictures of the author are all fabulous. As she says in her about section, she’s always smiling and proof of that can be seen by going through the different pictures she has available for viewing.

I liked reading the weblog portion of the site. The entries are broke up into several throughout the day, rather than one long, drawn out post. I like the idea of reading just a bit at a time, and not blabbing on and on.

Even though the entries are concise, you still find out a lot about the author. She’s got a wonderful relationship with her mom, a dog with nearly the geekiest (sorry, Daisey!) name ever – Linux – that is treated just like a child, and you just get the idea that she’s passionate about so many things.

You can tell from reading what Daisey writes that people are drawn to her, and love being around here. Just from the words she uses, it seems as if she has a wonderfully close relationship to everyone she spends a lot of time with and doesn’t take it for granted.

An artist, a web designer, a programmer, a musician, a singer – with that much talent and ambition, one can only expect all around greatness from this weblog. The greatness is certainly prevalent at [d.a.i.s.e.y].

[d.a.i.s.e.y]

“In case you were curious this page is about the random thoughts and ideas that go through my mind throughout the days” – Bill’s exact words on what this site is about. I couldn’t have said it better.

I wasn’t overly thrilled with the layout of the site. There’s only so much changing a Blogger template can do, and when you change the colors, that’s not always a good thing. Technically speaking, there wasn’t anything wrong with the layout, but I just didn’t feel like it flowed together well at all, and needed a bit of solidity in it.

I certainly had my fill of “What type of ______ are you?” tests after perusing through all of the available archives. Each weekly archived link is just filled with two or three entries – usually a test result thrown in somewhere, accompanied by one or two other posts, with one typically being some song lyrics or poetry of some type. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to read about something that Bill has actually done.

There’s not a lot to this site. If you know Bill, then perhaps you’d find it interesting to keep caught up on what he’s doing since he’s on a mini-vacation of sorts. However, it’s hard to actually connect with Bill and find yourself wanting to come back to read more.
The Bill site

This site opens up in a very simple layout, a simple navigation menu to one side, and turns out to be an entirely simple site.

There’s a nifty section under archives called “farewell messages”, which holds scanned samples of handwritten goodbye letters and notes Al received during his last days in high school. It’s a neat way to go about remembering those types of nostalgic things.

Al lives in England. Burl’s his nickname. That’s all I found out about him through his “bio” section, and that’s pretty much all I found out about him even after reading all of his archived news section.

There’s a link to an AlBurl.com forum, and a link to some funny graphics that have been uploaded to Al’s server for your viewing enjoyment.

Another clever little touch to his weblog is the “on this date in history” fact that he posts alongside each entry. But sometimes that’s absolutely all that’s posted. It’s hard to justify coming back to visit time and time again when there’s nothing to really “connect” you to the author.

I could really connect on a few of the things Al writes about – the way people that dial the wrong number can’t ever admit to themselves that they did make a mistake in dialing, and people who have the automatic security lights on their houses that flash on with the slightest movement. Unfortunately, though, those were the only two real personable entries that I found.

“AlBurl.com – for when you’ve run out of decent sites to visit” – that’s the author’s tagline at the top of the site. At first, I thought Al was probably being a little harsh on himself, but as I continued to read on, I could see how some people might feel that way.
alburl.com

“BlogLeft: Critical Interventions” is the name of this weblog, which is used to express thoughts and opinions throughout current events, focusing greatly on the blunders and idiosyncrasies that occur so regularly in the Republican Party.

The semi-dramatic music that briefly plays upon entering the site is a unique touch. Even though I browse the web with a 1024×768 screen resolution on my monitor, I still had to scroll back and forth along the bottom to completely read the weblog entries. I noticed after reading the archives of the site that the reason for the scrolling was due to an extremely long URL that was posted in on the main page of the site. All of the archives worked wonderfully on any screen resolution.

The contributors of the site are certainly two qualified candidates to write and post about the material you’ll read. Douglas is the Philosophy of Education Chair at UCLA, has his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University, and is a published author. Richard is the webmaster/co-director of www.getvegan.com.

In Blog Left’s infancy, Douglas and Richard would post each and every entire article of the link they were referencing. Now, however, they’ve resorted to sometimes briefly describing the news article they’ve posted. I prefer the latter of the two formats much better, since it gives the reader the option to either click on the link and read more or just skip to the next link that may have been posted without having to wade through so much text if there’s no interest in that particular subject matter.

There were two very interesting video clips available for download – both of which I would recommend downloading if you have some spare time (each are nearly an hour long), some interest in the topics the video cover (descriptions available on the website), and especially if you have a broadband connection of some sort.

The links along the sidebar go on and on, with what seems like limitless resources to gain insight to the news and to find out more information on what you might run across at Blog Left!

Average weblog readers that have no interest in the political arena, or just keeping updated with the latest significant news won’t be too impressed with Blog Left. On the other hand, those people that are looking for exactly that will be more than pleased with this weblog.
BlogLeft!:

My initial impression was of a site that is well laid out. There are relatively short posts, clearly distinguished from each other, usually accompanied by a small picture. There is an option to click to find a longer version of the post.

Band-Related, not altogether surprisingly, is about ‘life from halfway inside the Band’, the Band being Strûb, a Rocktronica band on the rise. If I had found this site randomly, I would have moved on. However, it is worth lingering. The posts, telling stories of day-to-day life, are well constructed, with an introduction, followed by a narrative, and an ending, sometimes as reflection on or analysis ofthe narrative. The spelling, grammar etc are of a high standard, with the few errors being obvious only to pedants. The writer has the potential to be very good. He has strong observational skills. His metaphors and similes are well thought out – perhaps too well thought out – and he tells an entertaining tale of life on the road with a band. He writes as a disinterested observer rather than with the emotion of somebody involved.

This is a well designed weblog, pleasing to the eye. The first thing you see is a Band bus, sleek and gleaming, with ‘band’ written across the front, and ‘related’ across the side. The sidebars contain a wealth of logically organised extra material – links to polls, photographs, cast list, feedback, forum and so on. They were all working when I tried them. External links are mainly band-related.

If you are curious to know what happens to a rising band on tour and in practice, I would recommend this site. If that doesn’t interest you, you will still enjoy the well-written narrative and an insight to a different life. I suspect that it would generally appeal more to men than women. In his latest post he hints that he will be ending his involvement with the band, but does not say what will happen to the blog. I hope he continues blogging about his new life.

I rate this a 4, because, although it is an “About My Life” blog, the life described is radically different from most.Band-Related