Month: April 2004

The first problem I encounter is the very bland look of the weblog when I click on the link for the url of the site. The second problem I encounter is the fact that there are a totaly of 7 entries, two of them are the same exact thing. It just so happens that these 7 entries are dated back to mid-year last year. Nothing new, nothing recent. The last problem I seem to find on this particular url happens to be the fact that my IE window keeps refreshing itself every 2 seconds because of the webcounter they have added to the page. Extremely frustrating.



In my opinion, there’s so little content that it’s almost not worth writing about. I start to wonder if maybe something is a little off, and I go back to TRW‘s reviewer area and find that the actual url is different than the title. The first url has nothing to do with movies, however the second does. So in actuality there’s two places that appear to need to be reviewed. The first had a handful of entries and the second appears to be about movies. I’m not entirely sure what to review, if I’m meant to review one blogspot blog (the one started last year) or the new one (started in January of this year). Am I allowed to voice my frustration with the new blogspot blogs? With added ad’s and now pop-up’s make for an extremely frustrating blog experience.

If I had to do the review completely based on the actual link that’s provided I’d give the review a 1. Plain and simple. There are a couple of witty quips, but that’s the extent of the content on the first link. The this one was the one meant to be reviewed, then the score might be a little bit better. It seems that the newer link is a movie review blog. The author gives his own opinions on the various movies getting a little bit of buzz in the industry. These reviews are somewhat amusing, but the design of the site takes away from the ability to actually appreciate his humor.



The design is typical of templated blogs. Light blue background, tiny box for navigation in the right, and massive amounts of white with black text. Period. In my opinion this author has a lot more personality than you can see in the design. It’s a shame too.

Considering the frustrations I had when I first began to write this review, I’m grading it a little higher than I originally anticipated, but not by much. The author is witty and somewhat entertaining. It was difficult for me to find the point of entries, because they were sporatic in topic. What would start off as a review for a movie would go into details about something entirely different. The blog has promise, but I probably wouldn’t go back.

My final score is a midway point between the first blog’s score of 1.0 and the new one’s score of about 2.5. Mondo Irlando

I spent quite some time looking at the graphic of the man holding a pint glass. I squinted and turned my head to the side trying desperately to work out who he was. I did not recognise him as a famous personality, and that confused me. I looked away and decided that I liked the boxed layout, liked the fact that everything looked nice and clear and easy to navigate and then, despite all my best efforts, my thoughts wandered back to the question of who Ron was!

I had to know, so I clicked on the About button. I was relieved as I was not meant to recognise Ron. Ron is the web site author, and the name of the site is a tongue in cheek reference to himself. Now I had that sorted, I felt better to carry on looking at this site! There was an assortment of things to check out on this site. The posts are of a varied subject, some technical and some that made me laugh so loudly, like his little girl and her poorly tummy.

The design is simple, which I always like. The only thing that daunted me on the site was the way the archives were presented. They appear in a list of posts made. Whilst this weblog is relatively new, I can see that as time goes on, the list could become very long. However, I liked seeing the titles of the posts, as it meant that I could pick the ones that I thought would appeal to me. I did take notice of the things not to drive my car over, once I had stopped laughing. Ron has a dry sense of humour that I liked.

You can change the site look. The styles box contains a few different designs so you can have a play and see the site in different colours. I liked that! The Old School design does require squinting or glasses though! He has chat logs that you can read about a bizarre encounter that he has made with someone! You can become a member and enter the chat room. There are also other people in Ron’s life that occasionally post, I liked that as you get to know them all, one by one!!

I actually really enjoyed reading some of the posts on this site. Ron’s sense of humour and dry comments had me in stitches at times. It is not often that you can laugh out loud whilst reading. Ron is starting a new job, and I hope that he gets access at work, as I really enjoyed his writing style. I just wish that Ron would post more, as this weblog certainly cheered me up today. I will be making a note of this one and coming back again. Thanks Ron.
Central Site for the Ron Martin Fan Club

The first thing I must do is warn the would-be reader about the contents of this site. It’s marked as adult not because there’s a chance of seeing someone leather clad with chains and whips, but because the subject matter happens to be about illegal drugs and their affectiveness to the writer. While most of the site is written very techincally, like a pharmicalogist, there are a lot of details about drugs, their effects, and/or their uses.

As a would-be web designer the first thing that always catches my attention just so happens to be the colors of the blog. The design, the look and the feel of a blog. All too often I find “diamonds in the rough” and other times I find garbage amongst gold. I can’t help but be drawn to this particular blog given that when it first loaded to the green pill. I wasn’t too sure what I was getting myself into, but I had to read on to find out. I can’t help but be somewhat interested in the content of this particular blog, because the pill just happened to be an “ecstasy” pill.

Veritas, the author, admits that he has a problem with certain kinds of drugs. He makes no admission to who he is, however, and that he is not the same person that hosts the site. In spite of the topic of this blog there are a lot of resourses that are provided to the reader. Links to various law sites stating specifics on drug use and posession. There are also a lot of caution statements and disclaimers for the reader to understand that there are consequences to the actions that he has chosen. I can’t however seem to get away from the fact that there is a wealth of knowledge to be found on this site that simply cannot be found elsewhere. I found myself reading entry after entry about different kinds of drugs and the effects of those drugs to the author. Some particular drugs are more potent than others, and for me, this is interesting to learn about. The entries do read very similar to medical records of sorts, and some of the terminology is tough to understand. However, the entries are also very informative, even for someone who doesn’t ever want to experiment with them.

As I said before, the design is very simple, but for the subject matter Veritas doesn’t really need to have anything over the top. The blog is definately much more effective with it’s simple design. You can read a little more about the author and his kind host in the various about me pages spread out between this site and another. You can search the site for a specific drug if you so choose, but otherwise, the extras are almost nil as well.

There’s not a whole lot besides information on drugs on this blog, and for some strange reason I found it oddly interesting. I couldn’t help but read through all the various things I’m sure my sister has tried any number of times. This is a blog focused on a certain subject, so you won’t find much by way of personal information, and definately nothing that might be incriminating. I enjoyed the site because of the amount of details that were available, however this might not be everyone’s cup of tea.castitas.com

Rick’s Alternate Reality certainly is alternate to my reality! It’s quite an unsettling first impression with the strange virtual reality images that form the banner on the site being strange and so large that, combined with the blogspot advertising, the text starts right at the bottom of my window. With no background information available on the author or the site you have to dive straight into the blog, but this is not always a bad thing so I just scrolled down and started reading.

The weblog itself has been running since June 2003 and is fairly well written. Unfortunalety, the content is mostly of a personal nature and the style is not engaging enough to hold my attention to the end of longer posts so I didn’t find much here that was to my liking. Rick has not posted much in the last couple of months and not at all in the last 27 days which is a long time for a blogger, but understandable in this case as he has a new baby competing for his attention!

There isn’t much in the way of design here as a blogspot template has been used and the banner images are taken from another site. The colours are well chosen for making the text easy to read but don’t really add anything other than this air of practicality.

Other than that, there’s not much else here. There’s a link to some photos but these are all personal shots that don’t hold much interest if you don’t know the guy personally. Perhaps if I could really get into the blog, as a regular reader I would be more interested. There are also a few links to friends’ sites and some other interesting places on the web which may be worth checking out.

In his first post where he tries to define the purpose of his new blog, Rick says “Did I just confuse the hell out of you?”. My answer to this now is an emphatic yes, but with a little work this might not be the case. Weblogs are very subjective and there are probably many people out there who could find something in this site now, but I think that with a bit more thought and more frequent posting there could be a wider audience out there for this one in the future.Rick’s Alternate Reality