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Rambling Along
This is a re-review of Rambling Along
As soon as I go to the site, I had to look up one Bernice Clifton. Once I read that this was who Kai, our author, felt he was the illegitimate child of, I was done. I didn't stop laughing from that point on, and the review took 2 days. thats a lot of laughing.
As for the site itself, it is hosted on Blogdrive, which I am becoming more and more impressed with. The only thing in this case is the placement of the ad distracts from the banner of the site, but I got over it. the layout of the site itself is clean and sleek, and I am really impressed with the use of images for links on the left hand side - something I took away as a tip for making my own site look nicer. It is easy to find everything you are looking for, including an About Me section!!!!!!
The writing within the site is very wry, sarcastic humour. It is some of the funniest stuff I have ever read. Kai is obviously well spoken and doesn't seem to care what anyone thinks about what he says. From writing new years resolutions for the stars, to telling off women in Wal Mart, he just says whatever pops into his head. I haven't found anything yet that didn't make me laugh.
Technically, the site is great. The links are all working, the little features like the message board function and I really didn't hit any problems. one small annoyance was the fact the page auto refreshes - for the message board i assume. Drove me insane. But that is likely just me.
Overall, this site is fantastic. I haven't laughed this hard in ages and over the course of the night shared the link with basically everyone I know. The only advice I have for you Kai, is don't change a thing.
This site was reviewed on 2004-02-23 by Princess Joanna.
They felt this site belonged in the Personal category.
Princess Joanna felt that Rambling Along deserved a rating of 4.5.
My first impressions of Rambling Along are not quite positive. Just finding out that the weblog is run by BlogDrive took away my high hopes of a good design and/or layout. So loading the page was done. Indeed, it was the typical BlogDrive template, but I see that there was at least a small effort made with the top image.
Later on, I skimmed, not read, his sidebar and his entries. I saw some very uninviting pictures and text which made me worry about making a review and for the first time, giving someone a score below 2.
Fortunately for Kai, the author, I thoroughly read his weblog and the procedure I did was only for the first impressions part of my review. When I finally got reading, I found out that he is as gay as his humor, which is ironic since the last review I made was that of a lesbian's.
Well, moving on. After the not so positive first impressions implied on me, I actually found myself absorbed reading Kai's entries. They are generally sarcastic and cynical and can even be offending at times but there's always a good point in Kai's realizations. Plus, for a self-confessed homosexual, he doesn't talk about men as often as other gay people I know. Instead, he'll blast out humorous opinions about the government, his pet dogs, a number of celebrities and even his grandparents. Most of all, with the way he puts it he enjoys his gayhood more than anything, which is a good thing because it makes his entries more personal, interesting and less sugar-coated.
And so I've mentioned, he uses visual aids as well. He uploads pictures and I'm not so sure if I want to know where he got them from. At first glance, you'd say they were very tasteless, but once you see the text that supports the picture, you'll probably realize that if a picture paints a thousand words, words make them a masterpiece. If I could give the crown for "Caption Queen of the Year", I'd most definitely hand it down to Kai.
His entry styles vary from long narrative ones, lists of whatnots and cracking one/two-liners. The good thing is that no matter what the length of his entry may be, there's always ann added spice to it, which makes you want to read on and on and on.
Well, I have been positive for the past few paragraphs. Now let's deal with the down sides of Rambling Along. I believe that Kai is very street-smart and wise, but I think he lacks knowledge about himself. He is very observant, and he outputs his thoughts with very playful words, but rarely do I hear him speak with more intimacy about what's really inside. Maybe I've missed it but it seems to me that Kai knows more about the world around him than the world inside himself. Sure, he knows he's gay and he knows what he likes and what he hates and what he thinks is stupid, but somehow he doesn't push himself beyond the line of personal access or however you may call that.
Also, words, no matter how great their meaning, will not mask out the dullness of the design. Even if he moves to a better weblog provider, with his self-confessed lack of HTML skills, I don't think he'll be creating some journal eye-candy any soon.
Another downside is his English skills. I've seen lots of mispelled words (even if he says he's good at spelling) and he has a problem with grammar too, specifically with punctuation (commas are very important, you know). Fortunately, those problems are still at a minor level and it wouldn't distract you much as it would do with those who sPeLL diZz WaY.
To sum it all up, I'd give the thumbs up for Rambling Along. The author has a great way of sizzling up this dog-eat-dog world with the humor that all gay men, I believe, are blessed with. His lack of depth and the boring template are lapses in his weblog, but if that's not what your there for, I'd recommend Rambling Along strongly.
(By the way, Kai, I have one of those butt washers at home.)
This site was reviewed on 2004-02-23 by Machi.
They felt this site belonged in the Personal category.
Machi felt that Rambling Along deserved a rating of 4.
Rambling Along, eh? Funnily enough that is what I myself seem to do an awful lot of the time but, unfortunately for me, not as well as this guy does it. The tag line is 'musings from a muddled mind' but the author is not as confused as he might have you believe.
The weblog itself is very well written, I think. The author admits that his grammar is not as good as his spelling, but both are still way above a good many blogs these days. Although it is a personal site, practically every post I read was very funny and so I just had to pop this one in the humour category. The first post was only in September 2003 but after reading the recent Christmas musings, I think I can safely say that this man has enough material in his everyday life to keep this standard going for quite a while!
The design is a clean and simple one provided, I suspect, in the form of a template from the hosts, Blog Drive. The advertising that makes this site free does not detract from the blog itself and the colour-scheme the author has chosen doesn't detract from the writing either.
This is 100% pure blog with no unnecessary extras. The hosts do seem to provide a couple of nice features though and the tag board is a nice touch, but the archives are awkward to navigate if you are looking for something specific. I didn't find this to be too much of a problem, however.
Although this site could, at some point in the future, benefit from a re-design, the one thing that makes it very good is already there - the writing. In the author's own words "think of it as Bridget Jones meets Queer as Folk, only with less sex and more slapstick". So far I think this description works quite well.
This site was reviewed on 2004-01-06 by Lori.
They felt this site belonged in the Humor category.
Lori felt that Rambling Along deserved a rating of 4.
Your first impression of this blog is very good. As soon as it had completely loaded (which took only mere seconds), I was surprised by the design, as it's a really rather unique design. One minor point though, the ads right at the top are really ugly. But for the rest it looks pretty nice.
Most of the entries are written in a humoristic way, mostly to amuse the reader, but also to prove a certain moral/point. The spelling is pretty good, although the lack of any paragraphs whatsoever may put you off from reading this blog.
However, this shouldn't stop you from reading this blog. It contains some very entertaining stories that'll get a guaranteed chuckle out of you.
Like I said before, the design is a very unique one. I've never seen it before on any other blogs, so it must be a custom one. The only down-side of the design is the side-bar (right). At certain points it's a bit crowded, and certain images give it a very amateur look.
All the links seem to work, and the archive links also function correctly. One minor thing; there seems to be a refresh every xx seconds, and this is quite distracting, especially when you're a really focusing on the entries.Overall, I'd say the design is very nicely done, and some work has obviously been put into it.
In conclusion, I'd like the say this blog is very nicely done, and definitely worth reading. If you need to extend your blogroll, I suggest you add this blog right now. You won't regret it.
This site was reviewed on 2004-01-06 by Kings.
They felt this site belonged in the Humor category.
Kings felt that Rambling Along deserved a rating of 4.
My first impression of this blog was that, even though the layout might be simple, it’s deceptively concealing a gem. I don’t know why, but I got a really good feeling from this site. The picture, which is the only really design oriented one on the site, is very abstract and suggest that the author will be unique. The classic colors also show someone with style.
I read on to find that quite a few of my initial perceptions were correct. First of all, Kai is a 30 year old gay man with a killer sense of humor. The more I read his blogs, the more I liked his site. Every entry was funny and entertaining and it made me wish I had a life that compelling. Another thing I like about his blog is that it can be read by any age group because all of the blogs are addressed with no particular age group in mind. I suppose some of the language used might not be suitable for a 10 year old, say, but to the general webloging community, this is perfectly suitable for anyone.
As I read through the blogs on the first page, I began craving more of Kai’s great stories and found that finding more of these comic masterpieces proved much more difficult then simply hitting an archive button. I found myself looking at a little calendar with the dates of posts linked. This isn’t uncommon but it is usually accompanied by a monthly archive link. Although this was a slightly hassle, I eagerly fumbled to some earlier posts and read on to be even more enthusiastic about his posts. Kai truly is a comedic man but it’s hard to read his comedy when it’s hidden in many clicks of his calendar month changer. I also found, to my dislike, that he blogged a total of one time between his first post at the beginning of September and mid November, when he seemed to start back up again.
The extras on this site are rather generic, with a tagboard, a cute, little Cartman (for you South Park fans), and a Quizilla result. He didn’t have any links to other sites he enjoyed or books of interest but I believe these will come with time. I think this site definitely deserves to be visited, especially since he’s such a funny guy, but I wouldn’t let the back arrow be deceiving when you’re looking at his calendar. It will keep going forever!
This site was reviewed on 2004-01-06 by Stephstah.
They felt this site belonged in the Personal category.
Stephstah felt that Rambling Along deserved a rating of 3.5.
Upon first arriving at Rambling Along, I was greeted by a highly functional, if somewhat clumsy layout. The eye graphic to the left is both intriguing and aesthetically pleasing, and the monochrome scheme seems to work well. I recommend the author get rid of some of the white space around the title, as it lends to a feeling of unbalance. Likewise, I was somewhat put off by the subtitle, "Musings From A Muddled Mind." To me, at least, any blog with the word "musing" in the title (or "rambling," for that matter) has a head start at being cliche. However, one shouldn't judge a blog by it's title (or its layout, for that matter,) so I continued with an open mind.
To the right of the page, one can immediately spot the author's biographical information, which is nice. Unlike some blogs which have no biographical information, or information too vague to make sense of, Rambling Along's author paints us a quick, concise picture of just who is behind this. He humorously apologizes for any grammatical errors describes himself as "am a 30 year old gay man with a penchant for seeing the "other" side of life." While it isn't really stated what this "other side" might entail, it becomes apparent that the author has a blunt, and entertaining. taste for sarcasm.
Kai, the author, has been keeping this blog sparsely since mid-September. The site seems still in it's infancy, and long gaps between entries are common. Much of this blog written with a kind of adolescent tone that is alternately refreshing and annoying. The entries are often all-out rants, many of which any reader can sympathize with. He railed against parents giving their children funny names, and talks about his experiences with the Catholic church. While some of this is charming, other entries come across as rather mundane, and result to describing daily events with mild and expected editorializing. Some comments he makes sparkle like diamonds in the rough, and when Kai described his mood as "aubergine," I couldn't help but grin. This is strictly a blog site, however, and the blog itself is the only content.
In terms of design, this site is quite plain, as is expected for a new site. The large amount of white space at the top of the page in unbalancing, and the photograph above the bio is very poorly scaled (I am unsure if it is of the author or not.) The seemingly monochromatic color scheme could work, and the eye graphic on the left is intriguing, though neither really compliment the sarcastic tone of the blog. The archives are difficult to navigate for such a small site, requiring the user to flip through calendar views and search for days one which the site was updated. I suggest the author switch to a drop-down menu or list of links for site navigation. Overall, the design is legible, but certainly has much room for improvement.
In it's present state, Rambling Along is a somewhat interesting site that some patient readers may learn to love despite its flaws. This is, one must recognize, a very young site, and the author certainly has potential. Amid the clutter, some gems do sparkle, and with a little more practice on his side, I'm certain Kai's blog could be a consistently entertaining. I advise the author to keep blogging, reading blogs, and developing his voice. This site is very much in it's infancy, and smacks of a work in progress. Eventually, Rambling Along could become something enjoyable for mass consumption.
This site was reviewed on 2004-01-06 by darling.
They felt this site belonged in the Personal category.
darling felt that Rambling Along deserved a rating of 2.
6 reviewers gave Rambling Along an average rating of 3.6667
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