The Weblog Review

First off, a warning: Chaos Angel is a highly personal website containing strong language and which discusses themes of an adult nature.

I get the feeling that Chaos Angel is not the author’s first weblog. The debut entry, from October 2002, talks about trouble with Movable Type and getting the domain registered; it spoke in a language that revealed a knowledge of technical matters. Further evidence abounds: a section with links concerning design, direct links to XHTML validators, and good, clean, semantically-rich mark-up. The design is a little plain, a little idiosyncratic, but works well with the content and frees the reader from the difficulties that often arise when all you want to do is read at your leisure.

The first couple of entries were poems (I am a particularly poor at judging the quality of poems so I will leave that to you to do), though quickly the number of topics increased; interestingly, each one is available as its own archive, which makes for particularly easy researching.

Quickly you learn that the writer, Pinky, is an unusual character with a distinctive voice and narrative style, peppered with quirks and bad language and often straight to the point. Her attitude is not a fabrication, nor is it born of teenage angst. Pinky is a divorced mother, proud of her children, brutally honest about her past. She confesses to having been assaulted and beaten by men, and even raped when she was 16; it could be said that this website is a means of therapy for her, a way of vanquishing her demons.

By the end of the first month Pinky becomes more assertive and more racey with her posts. October 31st discusses lesbian sex; following the link beneath that entry reveals an archive devoted to talking about sex; for many, this area will be the highlight of the site. The posts that follow are titillating, certainly, and greatly revealing. Pinky is a literary exhibitionist, happy to discuss the most intimate events in her life; her art lies in drawing in the reader, presenting difficult topics with a refreshing openness that makes the reader feel less like a voyeur using the site as a vicarious means of satisfaction, and more like a close friend able to talk rationally and maturely about sex.

Some entries are touchingly innocent; take for example in November ’02 when Pinky recounts the story of how she was told, by a stranger, that her father was gay. Or more recently, in July ’03, when Pinky’s daughter brought up the subject of masturbation.

The “About a Girl” section, the bit that acts as an “About” page that many readers use as an introduction to a site, can be a little misleading. So too the sexy photos in the “Photo-Box” section; bullet points and revealing images are no substitute for the rich texture that only a year of writing can produce. Work your way through the site slowly, and enjoy really learning about a person in a way that you just won’t find possible with 95% of other weblogs.

chaos

Blogspot templates can be pleasing to the eye, despite the ad sitting right on top of the page. Color co-ordination sometimes makes a page more boring than anything else, but in the case of Life Under the Pear Tree(green, of course) it’s charming. Actually it’s more about pears than pear trees, seeing that there’s a quote about pears and a picture of a pear. But then again, ‘Life Under the Pear’ wouldn’t really work. Perhaps ‘Life On the Pear’? Hmm.

Life Under the Pear Tree is written by a girl who calls herself Phenol, aged fifteen. Like pears(you had to have seen this coming), her blog is refreshing. Phenol is an articulate writer, recording actual happenings with perfect clarity and expressing abstract thoughts in her own special, sometimes zany way. Also like a full-figured pear, her entries are long and filled with details. Fencing is featured frequently, as is her habit of self-analysis. Phenol’s success is that she writes in a lively, imaginative way, injecting humor in all the right places. There’s the usual teenage angst, but over here it’s in a prettier package.

As mentioned, the page goes by a basic Blogspot template. Everything is green, on a white background. It all comes off as rather fresh and innocent.

Life Under the Pear Tree also has an extra feature that can either be a pleasant surprise halfway through the blog, or further indication that it is a teen blog that you’re reading. When you click anywhere on the page, tiny pears in different shades of green sprinkle out of your cursor. They remind me of a fountain emitting tear-shaped pears. Either that, or a fountain of pear-shaped tears.

To sum it up, Life Under the Pear Tree is a model of squeaky clean teen blogs – delightfully interesting, void of subversive or negative elements(no comments on Bush or any wars, no mention of drugs, no word about sex), and self-indulgent in a charming way. Like a pear, it’s healthy. Even if you’re not a teenager, this is a blog worth checking out, because the voice telling the story is clear instead of muddled by confusion. If you’re a crabby old person who shakes his/her head and asks “What is the world coming to these days?” when you read about how fourteen-year-old Mike wants to slit his wrist, head over right now and get your dose of hope. Don’t miss the hilarious entry about learning how to drive.

Life Under the Pear Tree

Once you get into this blog, you’ll be rewarded with a sometimes ascerbic, usually humourous and good-natured insight into the life and interests of a thirty-something homosexual American who did, yes – really, eat paint when he was a kid.

Jason Ate Paint is a mess though. There’s no consistency to the design at the moment, with about a half dozen reasonable ideas for an aesthetic competing with one another for your attention. Unless you’re a designer, the design shouldn’t matter – it should be transparent and keep out of the way, allowing you to leisurely peruse the content on offer.

The weblog itself isn’t particularly accessible from the get-go. The latest post is shown, not in its entirety, but only with the first paragraph leading into the story as a whole. It’s a good idea in theory, letting you get a glimpse of a story before choosing whether or not to follow it; however, there need to be more entries to choose from on the first page for this to work.

The site is laden with neat ideas – almost bogged down, you could say – a poll, a random movie quote section, a glossary of terms (worth reading – some are quite hilarious), a random picture of the week, an events calendar and an announcements section, all on the front page clamouring for space.

You can, and will, get past the idiosyncratic navigation and discover the worthy areas of the site (and even then, the content is not as easy to get around as it is on sites with more conventional means of archiving). You’ll find yourself, as I did, continuing onto the next post just after deciding that the last one would be the last for the time being. You’ll identify with some of the glossary terms regardless of your background; for example, “I don’t know… Internet?” works on so many levels.

There’s not much missing from this site; maybe that’s because it’s all right there, on the first page you see. More likely, it’s because there isn’t much missing at all, and you should just settle back and enjoy an interesting read.

Jason ate Paint

Kaizoku-Ou is ostensibly devoted to the Japanese comic form, anime. As well as the blog, which is the focus of the site and runs back a year in archives, there are also some anime character sketches, a potted history of the art form in 1990s America, a few photographs, links and, strangely, the author’s resume.

The first thing that you will notice on arriving at the site is that the blog is not on the front page. Rather inappropriately this is given over to a list of updates to the site – for example, on the 18th of July the comment reads ” New blog entry, updated links section.” Furthermore, once you select an area to browse, such as the blog itself, there’s no way to get back to the first page (in the unlikely event that you would need to).

The weblog itself is well-written, though at the moment it seems to be going through a dry spell. In previous months blog entries were more regular and numerous, concerning the author’s life and personal events, as well as comments on entertainment and anime. A neat feature of each post is that it begins with a title, giving the entry a theme of sorts, followed by the writer’s mood at the time, and what he was listening to (or watching).

Most of the posts follow personal events and so it makes for good reading, going through and watching a story develop. Readers not particularly interested in anime itself will still find content worth their while; unfortunately, comments on anime are aimed at the hardcore, with some knowledge of the subject presumed.

The language and tone of the blog makes it relatively easy reading, but the site isn’t helped by the design. Older entries still have white text on black, and considering the length (and width) of each entry, the long paragraphs, the small text and line-spacing, whereas the newer ones still suffer from the usual problems you’d expect of anime sites. Individual posts don’t have permalinks, so linking to a particular story is a terribly hit-or-miss affair.

Navigation is something of a problem too. The archive links are temperamental, mostly everything is targeted at a frameset that is anachronistic to modern weblog design. Perhaps the worst part of the design is that this is supposed to be an anime-oriented site. The author has a good handle on penmanship and it is strange that he has not chosen to decorate the site proper with more of his work.

Kaizoku-Ou is missing a few items that would certainly elevate its rating above what I have given it. For a start, a design with far more eye-candy is needed to compete with other anime sites. An about section, for the site and the author, would give new readers the opportunity to learn about the site without having to start at the beginning and work forwards. Otherwise, this is a competent, interesting read that I am certain will continue to improve in the future.

Kaizoku-Ou.org

I knew right away with GGSearch that I was going to have to start from the beginning of the archived entries and work my way to the most current entries just to get an idea of what the heck GGSearch actually is.

GGSearch is a search tool with Google power. Now, as mentioned on the site where you can download GGSearch, the GGSearch software is not a product of Google, nor is it related to everyone’s favorite search engine. “The application only makes use of some of Google’s goodies”.

Pieter, the mastermind behind GGSearch, is from The Netherlands and uses this weblog as more of a newsboard to keep viewers and users of the search tool abreast on what’s going on in the development phases of his creation. If I were to use this downloadable software on a regular basis, I know I would definitely appreciate being able to read straight from the creator what was going on behind the scenes.

The GGSearch weblog is hosted on Blogspot’s servers and the design is that of a standard Blogger template. Of course, with that in mind, the navigation is easy to follow, the colors all mesh well together, and everything is in working order as far as the technical aspect of it goes.

Most of the entries I found over the last two months were geared primarily towards the progress and updates being made to GGSearch. Every now and then, you can find a sporadic link to another site more likely than not having something to do with the Google search engine.



I would highly recommend this site to anyone that’s been stereotyped as one of those good ol’ computer geeks. For the average weblog surfer, this site might not be too interesting.

GGSearch