Month: July 2002

Where has this weblog been all my life? No joke, I enjoyed this site from the moment I read “cheerfully cyncial” at the top.

Pete’s Encyclopeteia is a personal weblog written with sense of humor and intelligence, making each entry humorous as well as thought provoking at times. It appears that Pete is writing for anyone out there that may come along, and does so in a straight forward and uncomplicated manner.

This entry is what Pete calls his critically acclaimed blog entry, and I must say it does a fine job exploring the depth and drama of having a weblog. Other entries are just as entertaining as the next.

One of the “extras” that made this site enjoyable was the random ways the time of the weblog entry was posted. On your average weblog it says something like “Posted by Wendy at 3:30 PM”, but with the Encyclopeteia, you get something a little different. A few of my personal favorites: “Realizing that insanity has its perks at 1:05am”, “Walking the fine line between clever and stupid at 1:07am”, “Enjoying A.D.- wait… where was I? at 12:13am”, and of course “Sex in the bathroom at 12:20pm”.

The rest of the site is a must see as well. There’s the “Encyclo-pete-ia”, which covers the different Pete-isms that are used throughout the weblog to better explain what’s being referred to. The “Conversations” portion covers some entertaining tidbits of instant messaging conversations, and the “Soap Box” is definitely worth checking account. I lost track of how many things I agreed with Pete on in that area of his website!

The design was well laid out, and the colors went well together. No complaints at all on the visual appeal of the site.

If only the “real” encyclopedia were this entertaining, I’d read it every day. That’s certainly how often I plan on visiting this site now.The Encyclopeteia

Wish you had a personal assistant to go through numerous news sources for you and pick and choose what they thought were the better ones? More than likely all the news links that is on Curmudgeonly & Skeptical is what you would be looking for.

Everyday there are posts about what is going on, all different news topics. The author gives us a little spin on the news by throwing in some personal quotes and thoughts on the entire process. Every post will have a link to the article in question, which is very helpful if you aren’t keeping up on everything.

The design of this site is a blogger template, and it is my least favorite of the semi-popular templates. I don’t know why I dislike the template, I have since it first was released. However, the author does make good use of the different sections that are created with the template.

Going through the archives is an interesting thing in and of itself. Because this is a news site, you don’t really need to go back to the beginning of the sites debut to understand the idea behind the blog. Instead, picking up today and reading it, is just as good as if you had read it from the start. This is one of the better news weblogs that makes full use of this effect.

Over all I have to give the site a 4.5 out of 5 because it is deserving of that score. It is well worth the read, and is very good for keeping up with current events. I would like to see the author invest in getting his own domain for the site, as well as a different design. But those couple of things don’t distract from the goal of this site.
Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

This blog seems dead. No entries are new since February. Not that it wasn’t dead to begin with–whomever created this blog laid waste to the entire time devoted to hastily constructing it. Which might be the best thing about this blog, because it appears to be a loss of only 4 minutes.

With regard to design: There doesn’t seem to be any title header, a–‘this is me and who I am’ introductory type ‘o sentence, or ANY FOOL THING, not even a syllable–to give the reader a clue about the blog or the blogger. Aside from that, the page colors gave me a headache. Red, mind you, is a wonderful color! For roses. Drops of blood. Miniature hearts. All small things. This persona apparently wanted me to get out the Exedrin. Graphics? Yes, very nice thank you, I love Luther Vandross and Donna Summer, but this blogger has apparently not gotten over her February holiday glee.

Setting all of this aside, I tried to read the 6 entries therein, and found your typical teenager blogger’s thoughts and daily updates, which would be fine, except for some poor grammar here and there, which gave way to just plain silly, almost worthless entries.

Don’t read this blog. I tried. It has no potential whatsoever. It seems that the author agrees to this, on a certain level (because her AOL Instant Messenger greeting subject invites her readers to tell her how much it sucks) but has apparently adhered to the terrible, red, method, instead.

All I can *hope* for about this blog is that I hope that it was done as some kind of school project, or better yet–a dare.I feel the Gruv

“Sometimes I wonder if life is worth living.” This is the first line of the first post on the site I read which made me cringe since it makes me wonder if this is going to be a site where the author goes on about how much their life sucks, but I was wrong.



The content of the blog is are typical stories of being a college student, specifically at UC Berkeley and her thoughts and feelings about this and that. But once I got into reading through several posts, I felt as though I was reading two different types of writing. One that was poetic, maybe a little to poetic that describes things in an almost cutely way: “The bright light from the sun burns my eyes as it shines through the windows …” Then the second type of writing was your average, conversational writing you find in many blogs. Now, personally I prefer reading the more conversational writing over the poetic, flowery type writing. It felt as though the author was pushing to begin a post with an amusing description which doesn’t seem to go well when a paragraph later you read that is just talking about something that happened on the way to the store. I would prefer to see just a little more consistency.



The site I must say is nicely laid out with easy navigation with different banner photos at the top of the different sections of the site. It contains links, a guestbook, a writing section with poetry and so on.



I don’t really go for the poetic writing that came up once in a while that much, however she does have some nice writing and good stuff to say.

elusive horizon

The name, in case you’re curious, comes from an early episode of
Buffy (Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered), so bonus points right
away.

As far as content goes, there’s plenty of it: a biography, Q&A,
quotes, photographs, so on and so forth. The design is crisp and
clean without stretching to “attractive”. I suppose you could call
it functional. Looking okay so far then. Well, except for that
fact that most of the pictures don’t work. But I’m sure that will be
sorted soon, so let’s move on. Who, then, is our host?

Well, he’s a student. A British student, no less. For those of you
unfamiliar with the average British student, allow me to briefly
explain that they are usually preoccupied with their ‘hilarious’
student antics. Including (but by no means limited to) getting very
drunk, boasting about how little work they do, being pompous and dull
and shunning the company of non-students.

Michael is a typical British student. Those of us who have to put up
with them every day will appreciate how irritating and uninteresting
they can be. This one is, sadly, no different. Definitely a blog
not to bother with.TripleB