The Weblog Review

Unfortunately, I’d volunteered 16 minutes of my dial-up existence to view this 2.6 mb page of mish mash. If I accidentally pressed “Refresh” there’d be hell to pay.

Apparently, Oral Sex donations are being accepted here. At the top of the page there is an image link with the words: Oral Sex Donations Accepted. Another one appears further down just in case you change your mind before you read the actual blog.

Having found what resembled a weblog, I didn’t know what to do or where to go after finding it, there didn’t seem to be any logical layout. Everything is ENORMOUS. The author(Tony Charles Zimnoch) must have a windscreen for a monitor because not only did I have to scroll up and down but left and right as well. The blog has pictures the size of Godzilla and text that can be seen a kilometre away on any freeway. The links, banners and advertisements are everywhere in a random format. The cacophony of colours is dizzying. There are lots of quoting, not enough blogging.

For someone who usually finds atleast one positive thing about anything, i was challenged with this right here. The only people who would enjoy coming here would be the author’s family and friends because random visitors might have a hard time figuring out what the blog is on about. The site probably makes slightly more sense if you have a screen larger than 1024 x 768 but if you’re on dial-up I warn you this site is hell to download. ebench

One word comes to mind when reading the gigglechick website: Funny. I guess that is what you would expect from a comedian, but it is still a refreshing surprise.

Erin, the aspiring comedian/graphic designer who maintains the gigglechick website manages to find the humor in even the darkest situations. Sometimes, the humor is dark, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes it is milk-through-the-nose funny, but it is always there.

The humor even shows through the site design. Erin uses a Pill-container, which she refers to as a poor woman’s PDA, as part of the logo. She has a section called “Jackasses & Stalkers” for people who instant message her out of the blue with inane questions, or hit on her. She even has a “Rantings” section for her extended diatribes about her life and thoughts.

Overall, this is a very well designed, well thought out weblog, and one that should be on everyone’s weblog link. gigglechick.com v.2

On first glance there’s nothing that separates this site from any other blog site on the web, no fancy graphics, no internal links, just a lot of good old fashioned blogging. The whole idea of Weblog Review is to review the actual blog, so it took a fair effort to ignore the lack of ‘extras’ and concentrate solely on my purpose being here, read the blog and review it. So here we go;

Just reading the first paragraph was enough to get me interested, actually anything about food will pretty much do that for me, but being tucked away in the land down under its always exciting to see what those wacky Americans are cooking up next, in this case deep-fried Oreos (which I believe is a chocolate biscuit?). Detailed and descriptive I was intrigued enough to stay interested in reading the blog for a lengthy period of time, and the writing is light and easy to read. Spelling and grammar-wise I couldn’t fault it, class act all the way.

The design… well I promised not to be too harsh here so I won’t. It’s a straight blog, limited graphics, but clean and neat so there isn’t too much more you could ask for. Comments are always nice too, it saves writing emails and you can share your thoughts with the author and other readers. Big heading break up the blog too which I rather liked, it just makes it so much easier on the eyes. Nice good sized fonts too.

My only comment to the author would be a bio page, I feel every review I do I say the same thing, bio’s are important to get some idea of the person your reading about. Its fine if you read it every day, but for me its pretty much guess work on who she is in the larger scope. Again you can live without it, but hey, it helps.

Overall I enjoyed reading ‘They Won’t Buy the Cow’, its one of the more interesting blogs going around at the moment. Personally I think there might be some issues there with ex-boyfriends that might need sorting out, but in a way it adds a degree of humour. Out of a score of 5 I give it a 3 and a half. Worth taking a peak.

They Won’t Buy the Cow

When I first saw the site, my initial thought was that it was cool and clean (and maybe a bit too “trendy”). The content is a comfortable reading size, and the overall color scheme is pleasant to the eyes.

Most of the entries appear to be about movies of some sort. Either brief reviews of movies he’s seen, or information on up and coming movies. When he’s not talking about movies, he’s got a generous amount of linkage to interesting news articles, movies, and online games. He has a writing style that is enjoyable to read.

As much as I like the writing, I am never impressed when I have to use a different browser than my default to view any site. I was completely unable to scroll any of the pages in Opera 6.02, nor was I able to expand the sub-sections on the left. There were minor display issues with Netscape 6.0 and Internet Explorer 5.0, but nothing serious enough to prevent viewing any of the information. I also had issues regarding link colors, and found myself having difficulty distinguishing exactly what was a link and what wasn’t. Not a bad design, but not the sort of style one would expect for a site mostly dedicated to multimedia.

If you don’t have any avid movie goer friends, you can adopt this guy. He’s your friendly neighborhood multimedia guru, complete with witty commentary. It is always a pleasure reading something that a writer truly loves to talk about, which this guy obviously does.GrahamDell.co.uk

Pink is probably one of the most difficult colors to use well, and the author’s use is average at best. I wasn’t sure what to expect, due to the bland nature of the design.

The articles listed on the front page were pretty lifeless. I browsed through some of the archives to get a better feel of the type of articles she wrote. I had a difficult time finding more than a handful that really got in touch with the author. It appeared to be mostly day to day type stuff (“I dropped the kids off and stopped at the bank…”, etc.) and the occasional link here and there to friends of hers. She sometimes talks about projects that she’s working on, but the entries about them are almost apathetic.

The site itself has a pure CSS layout (maybe a little too “simple”) that looked not quite right in my browser. A quick look under the hood explained why Netscape 4.x can’t even load it and the content to the right (nav & ‘rings) looks funny in Opera: multiple body/head tags. The visited links are difficult to see, since they blend in with the body text. I do have to admit that the design fits the log entries, though.

Overall, I was disappointed to see that someone with such a witty “about” page would have such a dull log. I would guess that only close friends or family would enjoy her entries.Work In Progress