Author: admin

Cold Climate Gardening is obviously a blog devoted to growing things in colder climates. It’s a collaborative blog which is only a few months old. I’m a gardener from a fairly cold climate [one hardness zone away from Cold Climate Gardening’s focus], so I can relate and I think this is such a great idea.

The bloggers who post to Cold Climate Gardening have a really good synergy. Their posts all sort of piggyback on each others, and, for those who understand the poetry of gardening, the writing is excellent. There’s discussion of how to plant certain flowers and issues of interest to gardeners, and book reviews.

The design of Cold Climate Gardening is very simple, but it really fits the blog. The greens are excellent and it’s very easy to read. My only complaint is the navigation. Archives only go back to November, but I found older archives by accident. There are no links between the old location and the new location of this blog.

Cold Climate Gardening has a great list of links to gardening information. In addition, readers can sign up to receive updates to the site. Contributors to the site are listed, but there’s no information about the contributors. I’d love to see a little information on each contributor – where they live, what kind of gardening they’re interested in, etc.

Aside from the navigational issues, the only real problem I could find is that the older archives show some broken image links.

Overall, Cold Climate Gardening is a good blog. I plan to become a regular reader. Because this is a blog with such a focused interest, I doubt it will appeal to a wide range of people, however.
Cold Climate Gardening

Ahhh, to be a goddess (or god…)! One day I hope to wake up and be on the golden throne with my scepter, until then I’ll have to be content living vicariously through Erica.

An impressive site and blog. The author opens her heart and shares it with the web. The sincerity, candor and honesty of her blog is refreshing and makes for an engaging read. There is well over a years worth of entries, and she blogs nearly every day. So, you can really get to know this author quite well and you’ll want to…

Reading the blog it becomes apparent how important family and friends are to the author. The entries express her feeling about the people in her life, she also touches on writing (she is writing a novel!), life stories, sexual curiosity, lessons learned and day-to-day observations. (Great taste in music as well IMHO) 🙂

A Sample of Erica’s blog:

“A conversation I had with an old friend of mine on Saturday led to a huge epiphany concerning the roles of other people in my life. Generally speaking, it is really hard for me to make good friends, like the kind you keep in touch with no matter what happens. Surprisingly enough, given my general standoffish attitude towards people, I have a couple of these close friends. Friendships are a high priority in my life…without them, I’d be an extremely lonely person, kinda like my mother. I see her go to work, come home, sleep…go to work, come home, sleep…and that’s it. I never see her do anything other than the mundane, everyday activities that make up a so-called normal person’s life. Nobody calls her, she doesn’t go out on her days off, she doesn’t invite anyone over. Other than me and one or two extended family members, she is quite alone.”

There are far too many excellent entries to post… I recommend discovering them for yourself. Without question, one of the best written and inspiring blogs I’ve read. A highly recommended read. My you never lose contact with your muse.
Vox Deam: The Voice of the Goddess

This is the complete site. There’s the weblog, which is quite mandatory for submitting your site to The Weblog Review, and you can learn even more about Kim through her “about” section, her writings, and the different photos she has displayed through her site.

It seems as if it’s been just recently that Kim’s acquired the domain name she now uses (afrochic.net). This site just struck me as a place that needed its own domain name. With the attitude and self-admission of being a “heartless bitch with no conscience”, you don’t get the feeling that she should be anything but her own individual place out there on the World Wide Web.

Ah, the writing – the entire reason behind why I visited this site. What goes on at afrochic.net? A little bit of everything. Kim’s in school and is an aspiring writer/poet/filmmaker. We definitely get a wonderful taste of the writing portion of that through the weblog. She covers things from her family life to current events to shopping to the current state that the music industry is in. And the best part is that it’s all done with wonderful sentence structure and all that good jazz. The writing here makes me laugh at times, and also makes me think at times. It’s a great variety of writing that makes this weblog stand out.

Is God gay? Kim’s got quite the convincing stance on this. While it may sound a bit silly, she’s got some very valid points here!

Design-wise, I’ve never been a big fan of a site that uses this type of format. There’s a splash page that includes all of the author’s cliques and rings which she belongs to, and then when you click on the “enter” graphic, another window pops up containing everything in the site. Kim, the author, does use some really bright and cheery artwork, however, which offset the format of the site enough to make me forget about it after a while. Even though the site is done with a bright orange background, it’s still not too hard to look at while reading through the weblog.

Overall, I liked this site a lot. I liked reading what Kim had to say, and didn’t ever get the impression that she was just typing away to see herself throw words up on a screen. Sometimes the writing didn’t pertain to me at all, and I had no idea what or who she was talking about, but that’s just something that happens with weblogs. I had a feeling of connection and of genuine interest in this weblog, and would definitely recommend it to anyone.

afrochic

Only up and running, according to the weblog archives, since June 2002, this weblog has clearly already become a hit with its readers. And after reading through it, I can certainly see why.

This is a group weblog. As of late, however, it’s mainly just two Girls in the Bag posting to the site – Emmie and Ellie. In their posts, they cover things from how they’d spend time in a peep show booth, thoughts of romances from the past, and quite a bit of sex.

There were some posts early on that I was completely in the dark about. Other times, I found posts that I could completely relate to and found myself saying “Wow, me too” from time to time. There’s just such a variety of things to read about at Girls in the Bag, and all of it is just so good.

The layout and overall design of the site? I loved it. The pinkish/purplish colors used throughout all coincided very well with one another. After hanging around the site for a while, I almost felt as if I wanted to buy toothpaste in 1950 – some type of a nostalgic feeling with the specific colors and black and white photo used in the layout. Weird, I know.

I really wanted to know more about the Girls in the Bag. After reading some of the entries, though, I can see how it could quite possibly be important to remain as anonymous as possible. There’s nothing hidden in these entries – except for the secret of exactly who these girls might be. I guess that’s just part of the “feminine mystique” this site is filled to the brim with.

This is, for the most part, a site where there are no rules, no limitations, and no reason for any reader not to want to make return visits to this site.

girlsinthebag

A standard Blogger template was the author’s layout of choice, with it being just slightly altered. Nothing really to write home about. I’m not sure what the title has to do with much of anything, or the image that Joel’s decided to use as the only graphic on the site.

The archives are grouped only a weekly basis, but only date back a month. With less than a dozen overall entries, Good Morning Robot can’t be given any higher than a 2.0 rating.

I’m hoping the Cowboy Bear Ninja game (very similar to the classic Rock, Paper, Scissors) takes off. I would love to see complete strangers making decisions in that format then the silly hand gestures they use in the original game now. There was also an interesting post about how to go about tipping different people in the UK. Should I ever make it over there, I know now what’s considered standard!

The author categorized this site as a humor weblog. While the biggest portion of the posts that are available are quite funny, I thought this weblog lied more in the personal category, and we’re just lucky to find an author who does have a great sense of humor to share in his posts.



Joel’s a funny guy. He posts about things that can, for the most part, relate to anyone. I’d check this site out for a good laugh, and perhaps bookmark it to come back now and then, because that’s just about how often it gets updated.

Good Morning Robot