Month: January 1970

I loved, loved, loved the look of this site. It’s a fifties-inspired print in beautiful red and salmon tones. It’s one of the most striking blogs I’ve come across visually. On the page linked for her photos, the 50s background changes to black and gray polka dots but it’s still a cohesive site all around. Most everything is well organized, easy to understand and follow, although some of the links take a while to load even with a cable Internet connection. I’m guessing it is because of the sheer size of the blog.

Luka (not her real name) is the blog’s owner, and she’s been posting for quite some time—four years—so the archives are extensive. She posts in her “Why I’m Luka” section that she is incognito because she wants to become ‘a better blog writer.” And she has, especially when compared to her early entries featuring what she did that day or how neat it is to write in her blog. Almost all bloggers start out this way, so there’s nothing new there. Luka still reports on her daily activities but they flow better than in the beginning. I would rethink the rambling audio posts, Luka.

She isn’t afraid to voice her opinions on hot button topics such as abortion and politics. She backs up her arguments with links to other sites holding statistics and in-depth analysis. I so like it when bloggers do this. It lets you know they are informed and they want you to be as well.

Luka is an amateur photographer and there is a section where you can see her work and her comments on her work. The photo page is like a second blog, a bonus if you will. It’s also a bonus because the photo blog opens in a separate window, thus giving you twice the Luka at once. (I would like to see the link to this page be more prominent on her main page, however.) There are self-portraits, photos of trips she takes, and (why am I not surprised here?) photos of her cat. If there is a cat owner with a blog who does NOT post photos of his/her cat, please alert me to this fact. I don’t think said person exists.
incogblogo dot net

Upon initial scroll-through, The Nomad Tavern struck me as a clean-looking site with a lot of links to trawl through. The name reminded me of all the deeply serious medieval-named chat rooms my Fantasy genre-reading friend Shelby used to frequent, and I hoped the site wouldn’t be an RPG nightmare.

I was glad it wasn’t, as I really didn’t feel like getting pelted with 12-sided dice today. In the most recent entry, “btm” (ben, tom, and mike, I presume?) make fun of “Tell Your Mentor,” a program that seems to serve, basically, as yes-man, toady-filled chat room, and blog all at once. As the “inspirational quote” at the top of The Nomad Tavern seems to promise “words as hard as cannon balls,” I was a little disappointed that the Nomads didn’t take full advantage of the ready cannon-fodder Tell Your Mentor could have been. Personal blogs have a habit of making apologies for themselves, a habit the modern world, so afraid of stepping on toes, has sadly encouraged, and the Nomads fall into this trap, chiding themselves for “being a little judgemental and perhaps harsh,” when there’s probably NO chance the creators of Tell Your Mentor will ever see their critique.

Props for even trying to decipher moral relativism, (“Raskolnikov, Napoleon, and Paul”) even though – and Tom must know this – it’s difficult to hold a surfer’s interest long enough to tell them the latest celebrity “news,” let alone breach their brainpan with words like “casuistry,” and “portray.”

The archived posts (from May 13 onward) are still mostly relevant, and it is geniuinely nice to read interesting analyses written by smart people, as most bloggers are duller than wood and as intelligent as a knothole. There are plenty of good links to explore, and a nice balance of personal and topical. The Nomad Tavern, though clean and easy to navigate, seems to be mostly geared towards the Nomads themselves and their circle of friends. But if you’re interested in current events, Japan, moral relativism, and Libertarianism (and too few are, really), there’s plenty to read. Special props go to this hugely entertaining entry, in which Tom ponders whether Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges in “The Big Lebowski”) actually does “abide.” The Nomad Tavern

The background of this site (ModBlog – Thoughts on paper) as it loaded took me back to about seven years ago, when I first got the idea of using a notebook paper image as my background… because, well, that’s the image that’s used as a background here. Despite that, the black and white sketch of a warrior on a mountain, and the big orange modblog banner, I was able to concentrate on fairly reviewing the actual weblog content of the site. Once I found the beginning of the site, that is.

As with any site hosted blog (Blogger, LiveJournal, et al. ), users aren’t really allotted a lot of freedom when it comes to layouts and organization of the archives of their site. Readers have to click through about four pages of archives before being able to find out where and when Taylor, the author, first started blogging here, which was April 4, 2004. Without much introduction or a very extensive “about” page, it doesn’t appear that Taylor just jumped on the blogging bandwagon in April.

Taylor writes very well. Quite often, I forget that I’m reading the blog of a 16-year-old. In fact, it sometimes takes posts spelling out the fact that this author is still in high school to remind me. “I know the skills are there they have gotten me awards, but that is another story that involves going through my life in the 6th and 7th grade,” he writes in a post about wanting to sit down a write a song. In the same post, he writes in detail about The Who’s Tommy album, which again isn’t really typical teenager blog fodder.

There are posts that are filled with typical teen angst, but instead of what could be deemed as a whiny post; Taylor expresses his angst via a song/poem that he’s written himself. These bits of expression can be found throughout the weblog, and do a nice job of breaking up regular entries.

Of course, his current entries have been dealing with a harassing person or group of people that have been leaving comments of sorts on Taylor’s site that he’s found offensive. Unfortunately, in the weblogging world, that will always be something that happens, and hopefully Taylor will be able to find a way around ignoring the harassment and continuing on with this weblog.

While this weblog probably isn’t one that the average web surfer will stumble upon and truly enjoy, it is one that is probably best fitting for readers around Taylor’s age and a bit older. Readers that are older than Taylor will be able to enjoy a few posts, but will then probably run out of commonalities or interests, just as they would outside of the weblogging world.
ModBlog – Thoughts on paper

“MaFt” originally started “a new thing” in July ’04 to, as he wrote, document what new thing he learns every day, an idea that he borrowed from his brother who never followed through with the plan. A weblog that’s actually written for the purpose of learning something was honestly not a concept I’d ever seen or enjoyed.

With my American grammar upbringing, I found it sometimes difficult to adapt to the word “learnt“, but that is one of the great joys of reading weblog from all over the world. Each time MaFt posts, it’s about something that he’d learnt that day, whether it be something like the exact definition of the word learn, as he did in one of his earlier posts, or something more enhanced and deep like … well, there aren’t any of what I would call deep or prophetic tidbits of information that’ve been posted to date.

It only took a mere two weeks before MaFt was worried he might not learn anything new that day, but, lo and behold, he learnt the price for a pint of beer at a new bar. The things that are learnt on a regular basis are rarely things that can be discovered out of a textbook or through some type of studying. Finding out that someone has an infection in their leg, discovering that a pack of ketchup was made in Holland, and learning the words and music to a song are a few of the many different examples of things the author learns and posts about daily.

The layout of the site is quite drab. It’s done in a black font on a gray background, with the only hint of real color being a bright green in the logo that’s shoved in the top left corner of the site. Running along the sidebar are the obligatory links to other sites, the archives that are listed by the week, and a tagboard for random visitors to leave messages.

As a reviewer, I always feel it’s important to find one thing about a site that would make readers want to come back. With “a new thing”, I was unable to do that. The posts are written in a very choppy manner, where it’s often hard to fully understand what the author is talking about or exactly what he means. The things he does learn aren’t really things most readers will find educational or even enjoyable, because these things pertain solely to the author’s personal life or experiences.

Some weblogs aren’t meant for the general public, simply because they don’t draw readers in and make them want to return. Weblogs like “a new thing” are better suited for people that know the author on a personal basis and know the background information on so many of the topics he does discuss.

a new thing

When “Incurable Hippie’s Musings and Rants” into my Internet Explorer window, there was absolutely no question about the title of this weblog. The font for the title is massive in size and is by far the first thing that a reader sees. Right away, the author describes herself as a “mad, in debt, feminist, radical, angry, pacifist, warrior, flower-power chick”, though, so that struck a chord with me and almost instantaneously gave me the desire to read more.



The author’s musings and rants fill the six months of archives with enough information to get to know her quite well. Every once in a while, readers will find a post or two where the author has written about a day-trip with a friend to another city or a poem she’s written herself. The majority of the posts throughout the archives are mainly the author’s observations on the world and news around her, instead of things that are happening directly in her life. As with any weblog, readers will also find the obligatory, yet thankfully just occasional, posts containing the results of “What ________ are you?” quizzes.



The author not only can make her sea monkeys come alive, but apparently they live a long time and she considers them pets. On a personal note, this amazed me because my sea monkeys never grew and that’s disappointing, because I already had names for them. This weblog author also shares stories of her hamsters. Normally, pet stories become tiresome, but with hamsters, these aren’t quite the same run-of-the-mill “I Love My Cat” stories that bloggers often abuse.



Located in the United Kingdom, the author only occasionally touches on the political side of things, either in Europe or the events taking place in the United States. She touches on topics in more serious nature, too, like living with a mental disoder or eating and dieting habits, for example.



Visually, the site layout looks to be that of a Blogger template, just slightly altered to the creator’s liking. The title is in a very large font, as previously mentioned. The sidebar on the site is full of typically blogging-type things: the monthly archives, a few of the latest entries, the author’s favorite links, various webrings, etc. Very basic colors of black, white, light gray, and blue are chosen for the site, and these colors are all aesthetically pleasing.



Six months isn’t very long in the wide world of weblogging, but this author has very early on made her weblog appears as one that can be counted on for a variety of topics to be discussed. Since we all know variety is the spice of life, this Incurable Hippie’s Musings and Rants are ones that can enjoyably be read by nearly any random reader.


Incurable Hippie’s Musings and Rants