Month: January 1970

Very small text was my first impression when I opened DelightzNET. I have 20/20 vision and I found myself squinting on a few occasions. Also every time I attempted to click on a link in the blog’s menu the whole thing moved on me. I’m not sure if it’s a glitch in the layout or if it serves a purpose I am unaware of, but I felt like a cat trying to swat at an unreachable piece of string. Other than that the layout is clean, basic and done in WordPress. It freaked me out a bit to see a young person holding up a Bush/Cheney sticker in the author’s pic, but to each their own.

The blog chronicles the life of a college senior attending Mason University in Virginia. Since this reviewer never attended college, I take note that it is always interesting to live vicariously though others. Learning about the stress of managing real life, midterms, and a job is always worthwhile. It seems that Stephanie, the author, has just recently decided to breathe new life into her domain and is not at all a stranger to blogging. She has only been posting again regularly for the past two months, but does a great job in her initial post of getting her readers caught up on her life.

The posts are in diary form, with a few reviews and rants mingled in here and there. Like so many young Americans, Stephanie seems to be on the path of attempting to find herself. In one of her posts she says, Is it possible that I’m realizing where I always thought I needed to be – is no where near where I really to be? , this seems to sum up her current state of mind.

The design of this blog is fitting for the type of entries it contains. The entries are written well and allow you to get to know the author on the surface. It is one of those blogs where you feel like you are ease dropping on someone’s life with one eye closed. I personally think that diary type blogs should contain a bit more depth to them. It seems like there is so much more that Stephanie could be telling us. Readers yearn for those things that lie beneath the surface. Speaking of surfaces, there are no extras involved with ths blog. It is categorized by topic which is always nice, but nothing out of the ordinary or different from all the other basic blogs out there.

The author categorized this blog as “Teen.” I would think that in would fit better in the “Personal” Category. This blog is about one person and their struggles, their loves, and the decisions that face them. The great things about blogs is that we are allowed to peek into people’s lives. We get to see how different we all are and how similar we can all be. It’s not a blog that I would revisit, but it seems to be a needed outlet for its author. It serves it’s purpose for her and her life. When we get down to basics, isn’t that what blogging is all about?

delightzNET

Dave, a seventeen year old from the UK, started this blog almost a year ago. He says in his first post, “It will be kinda nice to write some of my thoughts onto a page, even if they don’t make any sense, and I end up just babbling on about Michael Jackson.”

Dave is an enormous fan of Michael Jackson. In fact, his blog’s title bar contains a photo of Michael Jackson. The blog is also a really pretty purple color and has a clean look about it. In March of 2004 he comes clean as to why he is a Michael Jackson fan and it’s a good read. With all the bizarro events surrounding Mr. Jackson for so long, it is nice to get to know people who still consider themselves his fans.

But Dave doesn’t only talk about Michael Jackson. There are more things on his mind than just MJ’s legal battles and the Neverland Ranch. He posts about the war in Iraq, drinking too much at football games, and loads about life at his school.

I’m such a push-over for reading anyone’s blog who is English because I’m one of those Americans who openly wishes I said “chips” for fries or “shedewel” for schedule, so Dave’s blog does not disappoint. I mean, reading a June 2004 entry that starts off with “Today I went to Leicester University, to have a good nose about, checking out what it had to offer” well, who doesn’t love to read ‘have a good nose about’? Priceless.

I thought One Man’s Soul was a fabulous looking blog as well as a fascinating look inside a 17-year-old head.One Man’s Soul – www.dave.squizzle.org

Am I a lucky reviewer or what? Corgan Dane ROCKS! I’d advise that you get his autograph, now, so we don’t make him late for his date with destiny. This young man is going places! He’s not just toe-dabbling in the prose pond, he’s making a big cannonball leap, and I predict he’ll make a helluva splash.

This is his personal blog: it includes links to 2 previous self-designed websites that are well worth visiting. Watching him evolve as a writer, cartoonist, and designer feels a lot like seeing a behind-the-scenes documentary called Birth of an Author. At the age of 24 he’s already showing a great deal of wit and wisdom, and seems to have something interesting to say about a variety of topics. Even the more mundane semi-rants about school, traffic, and cyberspace seem fresh and entertaining through Corgan’s eyes and words. There is a powerful will to write expressed in everything he does, and he shows a real grasp on the nuances of the English language. He has a knack for side-stepping the pitfalls so many of us bloggers are prone to, such as the serializing of dull events, the aimless aggrandizing and self-conscience soul searches we do to fill up pages. He shows a refreshingly uncynical ability to poke fun at himself and others without whining, or smirking.

His design is a fairly simple blogspot template: easy to read, logical, and grammatically correct. His more experimental efforts are seen on his previous pages, which are easily linked along with other things that amuse or entertain him. He’s also a cartoonist and poet, with examples of all his work very accessible from this blog. He’s kept the main page quite free of anything that might distract from his focus, his writing. There is enough personal information everywhere to get the impression that he’s a pretty cool guy with a very busy life and a real passion for writing.

A few of the standouts in my memory are his recent entries titled American Dream, Winter Species, Internet Crack, and I Just Like Stuff. Each of those writings demonstrate a different facet of his style from introspective to humorous, and very few of his entries bogged down the reader at all. I found myself totally absorbed in his pages, following every single link and even reading all the poetry he’s written for a college class. He plans to write his second novel in November during the National Novel Writers Month and I plan to read it as he blogs it… this is a guy with ambition!

I believe that with just a bit more seasoning we’ll be seeing Corgan Dane on the New York Times Bestsellers list and I’m looking forward to reading and hearing a lot more from him. “Bob-On” Mr. Dane, may I have your autograph on this napkin please?The Annoyances, Grievances, and Misc. Happiness of Corgan Dane

Hurray, I thought when I finally saw this users profile – after two full minutes of waiting for a response from Modblog’s server.

I say ‘Hurray’, because it’s a fellow South African blog. It’s good to see blogging taking off around the world, and of course that’s why we’re here.

Now that I have established this bloggers nationality, now I have to try and figure out more about them. This in itself is quite a difficult task, as it’s incredibly complex to read, not visually, but grammatically. Lest I begin to sound like my matric English teacher, I move on.

Modblog does allow for some cool features, most of which this blogger is making use of – i.e. the photo gallery, the daily poll comment box, user profile etc. He has also moved away from the standard templates offered by Modblog, by tweaking the html to reflect personal colour choices, some great smoothing effects and many of his own ‘anime’ type images. Very nice.

This blogger is somewhat of an amateur cartoonist, and uses his blog to show some of his work, since I am by no means a cartoonist, I won’t begin to judge his work, other than to say that I don’t get the joke.

Modblog archives previous posts in a different style to most blogging services since they are not filed by date, but by category, and scanning through them – I realise that they make no sense at all, and having tried to click on these links with two different web browsers and having no success, I suggest that this blogger chat to his blog service about this.

I find very little of interest in this blog, but honestly feel were I a 17 yr old boy, part of this bloggers captive audience, and into Anime that I may have thought this blog great. Since there has been some effort on this bloggers part to ‘beautify’ his blog, I feel it deserves a rating of 2.5.Reviewed by a Retard.

mcphee, author of this blog, and who insists on no capitilisation on that, is a role-playing, football obsessed, geek, and describes himself as such in his first post. The blog is pretty personal, and seems mostly aimed towards friends in the earlier archives, and not what I would describe as particularly geeky. REAL geeks would say they’re a nerd, naturally, and would also have that whole robots.txt deal down pat.

There wasn’t much in the way of terribly interesting subjects to grab me in the archives, and it lacked a certain sparkle. There are cartoons posted on a regular basis made by mcphee featuring humourous conversations between a pair of monkeys, but even this didn’t particularly encourage me, and not enough to return to read it again, I’m afraid. Not even the post regarding Mike Reid, either, sorry, and I do agree he’s a git!

The layout itself isn’t particularly practical, more posts to a page would have been ideal, as there are currently 29 pages of archives to trawl through, and no quick way round it either – although the entire collection of monkey cartoons are available seperately by clicking their image in the header.

I think this blog could benefit from a few minor changes to the layout, as mentioned previously, and I understand that the content may be interesting to similarly minded persons, but it just didn’t inspire me at all. I will indeed be returning less than daily.

Less Than Daily