Month: January 1970

I was intrigued when I saw the title of this journal. “Humorous Blips From A Backpack”? Would it be the day-to-day dramas of student life? A travelogue? As it turns out, Humorous Blips is a bit of both.

The author is Beaner, a young singer, student, writer, and world traveler. In the past year, she embarked on a year long backpacking jaunt across Europe. At least, that’s what I could glean from the parts of the journal that were accessible.

After reading Beaner’s ‘About’ page, I headed for the archives. There are links to archives stretching back to April of this year. Unfortunately, all of the archives prior to August lead to a BlogSpot error page. This meant that I only had a month of posts to review, hardly enough to get a sense of who Beaner is or what she is trying to communicate with her journal. As if that weren’t bad enough, on the pages I could read, some of the archive links would disappear. I was forced to go back to the home page and access the next month of posts from there.

I wish the archives had been working. Not only would it have garnered her a better review, I was also interested in reading the full account of her time in Europe. As it is, there are only a few weeks of posts detailing a pilgrimage in Poland, some adventures in Latvia and Lithuania, and her voyage home. After her arrival back in the U.S.A. (Las Vegas, to be exact), there are a few days’ worth of posts detailing her return to school and struggle to find a job.

Although many of her entries are detailed and funny, there seem to be a lot of gaps in her stories. I realize it must be difficult to update a website when you’re backpacking through a foreign country, but it’s frustrating for the reader to begin a tale and then be denied the ending. Some of the entries written after her arrival back in the States suffer from the same gaps. There’s nothing wrong with a journal that’s sporadically updated, as long as the entries flow together and don’t confuse the reader.

The color scheme of the site is taken from a painting featured on the front page of the journal, one of Degas’ beautiful dancers. The reds, yellows, and white work well together, although it is a little harsh. The design is simple and easy to read, but not the most attractive I’ve seen.

I wish I could score Beaner’s journal higher, but the lack of complete archives and unwieldy navigation prevent me from doing so. Her writing is lively, and the subject matter is fantastic (indeed, I wish I could have read more about her adventures in Europe). If she gets the problems with her archives under control, she would have a travelogue worth visiting.

Humorous Blips From A Backpack

For someone who loves purple, it’s always a nice surprise to go to a blog and see purple everywhere. I figured from the title that this might be a group, blog, but only reading the remainder will tell. Upon reading about the author you find it’s one author. I do enjoy the very cartoony look to this blog.



As you read further you find out that the author, Katia, feels a desire to write, as most bloggers do. She admits that she has no direction in her writing, and it’s simply for herself, but some of her posts might find quite interesting. The blog itself is very personal. There’s a lot of french strewn about in the midst of the text. Early entries about neopets are cute, as her and her husband both were slightly obsessed for a moment. The entries have a tendency to be along the lines of “i did this today” kind of entries. While others are short sending you to something she found interesting or funny. While you might find yourself searching for the gold in the masses (she has a lot of posts for each month of her archives) there are the occasional wonderful stories that leave you smiling. The entries are well written, and for the most part thought out.



The design is very cute and very original. When you change to different pages, the image on the top right changes as well. They’re not overwhelming and overpowering of the blog, but actually accentuate the content. The navigation is easy to find, although when browsing through the archives it would be nice to have a “back to top” link, becaucse Katia actually writes quite a bit each month.

There’s a lot to read and view besides the general blog content. She gives you the option to change the look of the blog and I’ve always liked that feature. There are a lot of good external links with only a few broken ones (from earliest archives).

This blog has had a wonderful beginning and a middle. There’s a lot of content to read through. While some of the entries are rather mundane in it’s day to day nature, the others are worth a read. Some are nostalgic and others just wonderfully written experiences. There are quite a few spelling errors, but nothing that takes away from the reading of the blog. There’s also a portion of the blog written in french, and while I don’t understand it, it probably accentuates the content as well (if only I could understand them). This is a blog I would read again, though probably not on a daily basis.An Aussie Lass, a Frenchman & a Burmese

The title itself suggested this was probably done by a little girl, maybe in junior high, for a bit of fun for herself and her friends. The hot pink background you see for some time as the site loads reinforces this idea.

This site has a lot of technical problems. It’s two colums, but the boxes and sliders everywhere are frustrating. Sometimes the archives work; sometimes they give you a Blogspot error message. If I’d just been a casual visitor I probably wouldn’t have hung around long enough to read through it. It’s graphics heavy and there’s also music, and an upper navigation bar I found eventually, as it took a full ten minutes by the clock to fully load. (Often, those on high-speed connnections forget that 50% of the online population is still on dialup modems, as DSL and cable is not available everywhere.) Some of the links in the left go to inactive webrings.

While I was waiting, I skimmed through the archives and found there were a few spotty entries since July of last year. I discovered Deb is a 20-something college journalism student, so this is probably a “fun” project. Such entries as there are have quotations found on bathroom walls, some lines (with more graphics) about Barbie and the author’s Women’s Studies teacher. If this is a parody on ultimate ditziness, I’d like to see more! This is why I hung around long enough to try and read more of the entries. Even the “non-blog writings” (also difficult to get in and out of) are downright hilarious!

It’s clear she’s put a lot of work into creating this world — next time I’m out at the college where they have a T1 connection, I’ll make a point of visiting this site again for a better look. But if I was teaching writers at her school this young woman would definitely get some extra credit for this blog.

I’d recommend it to anyone with a high-speed connection, who could use a laugh for the day. Judged on content alone, this blog would rate a 5, but unfortunately the technical problems will put off some visitors, so I’ll give it a 3.

Deb on the Web

The first thing that caught my eye on this blog was the neat background and the interesting header image. After that, it looks like your standard personal blog/journal. The title, “Stephanie’s Online Diary,” verified this assumption.



Random Scribbles is the diary of a gal named Stephanie. Her entries are pretty interesting and honest, but they are few and far between for my standards. After going through the archives, it looks like Stephanie doesn’t blog as much as she used to. I’m sure there are reasons, but infrequent updates don’t make for a good daily read. There’s a good variety in her writing, but there’s nothing that really sticks out for me.

The blog is well organized and is well designed. It’s a Movable Type blog, so it has organized archives and integrated comments, which are always a plus. Stephanie also took the time to customize her template with a nice looking background and a captivating header. Very nice.

Overall, this is a very well designed personal blog, but there isn’t really anything special to warrant it a daily read. I’d definitely come back though and see what Stephanie is up to. Random Scribbles

A quick look at the list of Jim Howard‘s interests is innocuous enough at first, until you reach item number eight: nudity. As the site’s tagline so neatly states, Jim is from Missouri, words aren’t enough, you’ve got to show me.

However, aside from a semi-nude cam photo in the top left corner of the site (nude from the waist down, mind you), there isn’t an awful lot of skin outside of the photo galleries. The blog is a mildly diverting read; currently a lot of time is spent discussing the site’s eventual move to a new url, and the problems Jim is having securing a domain name. The content is often relatively personal – no grievance sharing, plenty of familial discussion – though it reads well and the author pays attention to his spelling and grammar, which certainly helps.

Unfortunately, one thing Jim has apparently not devoted much time to is the site’s design. In IE it is passably average, in Netscape a little less so. The masthead is a poorly optimised jpeg with red text on blue that blurs more and more the harder you try to read it.

The site is a three column affair, though a little more organisation would help with the placement of links – one column devoted to external links, one to navigation, would make far more sense. So too would having a proper archive: there is a calendar view of September, though it is impossible to select a different month to view so trawling through older posts is a cumbersome and involved process of selecting the last entry and clicking the link to the previous one each time.

There is a reason to come back to the site; many reasons, perhaps. The author and his family are moving house, and are saving to do so. The struggle to save money is well communicated, so too the search for a new home, and how different family members treat the process. With any luck, Jim will find time to redesign after the move(s); a change could do this site some good, but until then, at least it’s easy enough to read everything that happens in September.

Jim Howard’s ShowMe