Month: December 2001

How many times must I see a splash page for a weblog? They serve no purpose! Thankfully the author chose to have the page auto-refresh right before I could click the big moon to enter.



Once inside the page, I just gasped. The layout was very original and it kept the moon theme apparent. The navigation is through each of the moons up at the top. Very nicely done JavaScript rollovers.



The weblog is hard to read. The reason I say this is because in order to look at the old posts, you click on the harvest moon and then you have a list of posts. None of the posts have a link back to it just click the moon. The list of posts for all I know could be in random order. Dates are not listed except on one post. Weblogs have order to them. The good part about the posts is they are full. The author leaves nothing out of the topic that they are writing about.



All in all, the site has potential to be really good. A little bit of reorganization and it will be really good.

Hunger Moon

When I write reviews, I have to put the weblog into a category – humour, news, teen – and this one is in Personal. In fact, it’s more personal than most.



Is this because the author, Ane Cutler, shares her deeply private thoughts and secrets with us? A journal? Witty insights into her life?



No. It’s because she (and a select group of friends, so it appears) is the only one who understands the damn thing.



The design doesn’t properly fit on the screen. There is some kind of confusing links system (needlessly duplicated twice on each page) and the blogging shows a weak command of the English language. So much of it is related to her friends and messages to them it is consistently uninteresting – like a private joke that doesn’t include you.



In her own words “shit this really sounds boring,” and I couldn’t agree more. Safe to ignore.



PS. (i could have given this a 0.5 – but bless her, she had a car crash and man trouble – you’ve got to sympathise.)d00r

Having visited this site voluntarily before, perhaps I’m not the best person to write this review.



The design is an effective way of displaying the blog, with just the right amount of colour to brighten it up.



Each entry is as funny as the last, if not funnier and judging from the comments other people think so too.

Blogs are usually filled with depressing drivel that no-one wishes to read about, this is where xeres.com is truly different, each entry is light hearted and the comments system gives the reader the chance to interact with the author.



Overall an excellent blog, it really is worth a look to see for yourself.

xeresdotcom

Freegreymatter is a peculiar site. The overall colour scheme and aesthetic is part good, part awful, with some nice touches (such as the top level navigation) and some really odd choices (space-esque background, thick red border).



What this designer needs is a lesson in minimalism: keep removing elements from a design until the design works. It would appear that originally the opposite approach was used.



Content-wise, this site is okay though it feels like less of a natural expression and more like a forced effort. For example, the most recent blog I read was a series of hyperthetical questions and answers (eg “If you had to lose one body part, which one would you pick?”) that were, for the most part interesting and entertaining. Unfortunately, they were introduced as content for the sake of content; the writer could think of nothing else to say.



Another lesson in minimalism: if you can’t think of anything to say in a blog, don’t say anything. Otherwise the end result is just noise that distracts from more entertaining posts (again, remove the elements that don’t work).



Structurally there is a lot of work that needs to be done on this site before it reaches it’s full potential (at the moment I doubt that much grey matter is being exercised by reading the site).



If some more focussed design principles were employed, the score of this site would improve, but without any true direction the posts suffer.freegreymatter.com

The front page of this site is, somewhat ironically, a relic of a bygone era in web design. The logo beckons you into the “atomic age”; which was exactly the thinking behind a large proportion of sites from the Internet’s infancy, a time when everything was futuristic and space age, and everywhere made use of the space age metaphor.



Unfortunately there are a lot of reasons why this wasn’t true. In the fifties we were promised hover cars but ended up with the petrol crisis; in the nineties the Internet was promised as new, fresh and instant, yet what we in reality saw looked decidedly amateurish in comparison with magazine print, and was far from instant.



That is entirely the case with 1atom12. The logo is thoroughly uninspiring, and the page itself takes far too long to load. Since all the content on the front page (and there is a massive amount) is contained in a table, you don’t see any of it until it has all downloaded, it seems as though you are waiting for nothing, and I’m sure many will be inclined to reach for the “Stop”.



Though the content does go some way to making up for such lacklustre design and style, the navigation is based too much on guesswork so finding off-blog material will prove tiresome.



This site does border on the “Adult” from times, with a cam view showing semi-exposed breasts, but there isn’t enough to warrant such a label.



Whether or not there is enough on the site to warrant a visit is dependent on taste and patience.1atom12