Review 2706

I’m not usually fond of the darker colored sites, but this one is readable, at least for a short while. After spending a large amount of time on the site, the white on black letters seem to run together in a blur. The color scheme, however, works well together and the pictures add a touch of brightness to the dreary black background. Based on my first impression, I didn’t expect to find much more than exaggerated gossip concerning the stars of our Hollywood world and the other characters that grace our tabloid pages.

Unfortunately, I was all too correct on my assumption. This blog, while it serves its own purpose, is little more than a rehashing of the events going on in the lives of those people most of us will never chance to meet. Unlike your “typical” fellow bloggers who are separated from us by distance, this blog focuses on those individuals out of reach due to wealth, fame, and star quality. We’re talking the cream of the crop here, folks.

The short version is this: the author (or authors) take the daily garbage and re-word it into nothing any more spectacular than it was the first thirty times we heard the same gossip over the radio, on television, and in the tabloids. The re-wording is ever so slight. I hesitate to say there’s any “cut and pasting” going on, but there might as well be. There is very, very little commentary thrown in, but there is SOME. However, the commentary also reads like reheated verbiage.

Unlike most “news blogs” there is no linking to anything supporting what is posted, but there really is no need since we can verify the “stories” by merely turning on our television or radio. This blog hasn’t been around long, but the links mostly work and everything is clean. There are two links to the author’s sites, however, one is broken.

Steve and Tiffany (broken link) are both listed as contributors and seem to share the burden of posting equally for the most part. There are a few less posts by Steve and Tiffany is certainly wordier with her entries. However, it is very difficult to get any sense of personality or humor regarding either of them due to the type of writing they engage in for this site.

I may have been a bit harsh in this review, but news blogs of this type aren’t anything special. There is nothing that makes this blog stand out from any other of its type. It’s good for a one-stop shop for all your gossiping needs, but I would hope the world has better things to do than keep up on this type of “news”. And I use the word “news” loosely.
Scandal Snoops

Review 2708

Upon entering Will’s Delirium, I am greeted with the startling whispered message: “It’s gonna be okay” I sure hope he’s telling the truth! There is a black background with a stylized graphic of our author. The newest entry is displayed to the right. And there is virtually nothing else on this page. No links, no frills, no errors… well, we’ll see about the errors later. The only other thing on the page is a cryptic countdown to “Freedom”. 53 days and counting at the time of my review. This blog is the epitome of minimalism. A Zen kind of blog if you will.

I began to read the entries beginning with the present. And what emerged as I continued was a deeply introspective young man of a philosophical bent. His entries are intensely honest and very personal. He asks himself big questions and sometimes arrives at answers, but just as often does not. Frankly, this is the closest thing to a truly personal and private journal that I have thus far read for Weblog Review. These entries are more like the things I write in my really real journal, not my blog. In this respect our author is particularly interesting to me.

The writing style is clear and understandable. No obtuse references to nebulous things here. There is no “About Me” page, I found by reading that the author is in college and also works. But these aspects of himself are kept way in the background in the entries I read.
I would have read more but the rather awkward navigation began to get tedious, and finally started to balk. When I clicked on an archive date, the screen went white and it took up to a minute to reload the archive list. After about the 12th time trying to get back there, I gave it up.

The archives go back to February of 2001. That is quite a body of work. I would suggest an easier navigation function for those interested in reading more than just the most recent posts. In the older archived entries there are many graphics that no longer work, which may or may not matter to the content of the entry. I just mention it because there were so many of them.

I might check back in with this blog from time to time, to see how the author is doing in finding answers to Life the Universe and Everything. He certainly is asking all the hard questions.

Will’s Delirium

Review 2345

As I was thinking about Spriteboy World, I thought the name sounded familiar. Where was it I had heard this before? Why was I drawn to this blog like a magnet to a fridge? What was it that made me want to read it?

They say that first impressions are the best impressions, or at least the most memorable. Spriteboy World has a very nice, clean, hip layout that loads very fast. At first I was a little turned off with all the green, but then it grew on me as I read the archives. More on the design later.

One thing I hate is a splash page. It serves no purpose. Spriteboy World gets around this issue by actually posting real information to the first page. So its not so much a splash page as it is more of a directory. Where would you like to go today on this little website of mine? Of course I went directly to the biography section to find out a little more about our Spriteboy.

Birthed from a mother who is Mexican chihuahua and a father who is an Irish leprechaun, I immediately knew this was going to be one fun ride of a blog. And this also explained all the green on the site. But there is more to Spriteboy (aka Chris) then just his heritage. He lives in New York and seems to be in the loop with some semi to very famous people.

The blog itself is about his daily life. Most of it is told as such as it is a summation of what is going on in a funny way. Just the good parts are what is typically featured here but of course with a funny spin. He took a break in March of this year, only to return in May. The posts since his return were the most enjoyable for me. More depth into who he is, more opinions on what is going on, some good realizations about life in general, and it was refreshing to read about someone else coming to grips with similar things. I would go into detail about the major event that is going on his life, but I don’t want to tell you everything.

I have one complaint about this blog. It is surprising that I only have one problem considering most blogs have numerous faults. The problem lies with the archives. You can only access them one post at a time. This is annoying and creates a lot of work for someone to go through a site’s history. Imagine if you had to turn the page of a book every paragraph. Yeah that was how I felt with this. Put the archives in a monthly format so we can just read the site. It is enjoyable to read, it is not enjoyable to do work just to read.

By now it is very obvious that I enjoyed this site. I would have given it the perfect score of a 5 but the archive situation really annoyed me and threw me for a loop. Spriteboy has an amazing site. Oh yeah, remember my question earlier about why this blog sounded familiar? Yeah it was because he was reviewed a year ago. And since that review he has grown a lot and I really enjoyed reading this site.Spriteboy World

Review 2708

Will’s Delirium is the on-line journal (thoughts, rants and other posts of good, accurate writing) of someone named Will. We cannot really know anything other than this because there is no information on the author. I could find no “about” links on his site and only by reading the archives (which date back to 2001), did I manage to find out that Will may be a teenager or a man in his early twenties. Whatever the case, he studies (as he usually refers to “homework” in his posts), other than this, I simply cannot say.

The template is black with a table in the middle; you can scroll to the posts that show up on his main page. To the left of the table, there’s a photo of Will (maybe retouched with one of Adobe Photoshop’s filters). If you scroll down to the end of the post section, you’ll find the sole link on Will’s page is to his archives. The template could use a little more work, it’s too middle-oriented.

Will’s writing is in-depth. He constantly asks questions about himself and you get the feeling he’s still trying to discover who he is or can be. The posts are honest and many of them deal with what goes on inside his head. They make for good reading if you enjoy discovering a person’s soul, if you enjoy “lighter” blogs or blogs of a more amusing nature, then this is one blog you wouldn’t want to visit.

Personally, I enjoy this type of writing. I like reading blogs where people pose questions and try to find answers. It makes the reader feel like he or she is part of the author’s growth process.

I give this blog a 3.5 because of the lack of information on the author and the lack of links. I think it detracts from the blog, making it look stale. Most blog readers are a curious bunch, and most crave extra information. Even if you wish to remain anonymous, there are ways to make your blog more appealing. Were it not for this, I would have rated it higher.
Will’s Delirium

Review 2662

Fat Eye For The Skinny Guy. The page is sharp looking with a pleasant dark background with lighter colored lettering. Works well. The three column style is not my favorite, but what are you gonna do, lots of people have them. Seems to me that it might make more sense to put your excess linkage on another page and let your writing be the focus. But let us not quibble about the little things.

The big thing I want to quibble about is that our author has written his own Weblog Review already. (Why didn’t somebody tell me this site had been reviewed? I would not have spent the last two hours reading and making notes!) 😉 Here is a list our author has kindly provided of reasons why he thinks his blog is the worst of them all:

“1. It’s not funny

2. My life is pretty pathetic

3. My About Page is all false

4. Everything I talk about is stupid

5. My layout is boring and uninspired .”

Interestingly enough, this is a good example of an underlying theme of his blog. He makes fun of himself, before anyone else can do it.

Only thing is, while he is doing this, he is pretty darned funny. His writing is sort of a cross between Rodney Dangerfield and Don Rickles. If something bad is going to happen, it does when our hero is around. From not being able to go to major league baseball games for various and sundry reasons, (even though you have season tickets) , to having the whole cheerleading squad turn snotty on you, he seems to end up on the short end of every stick.

There must be something in the water in New York City that everyone seems to end up so….. grumpy. And just a warning if this kind of thing bothers you, the author has a severe case of potty mouth. (Not that there’s anything WRONG with that.)

As he freely admits, his About page is pure fiction, so we won’t go there.

One entry I submit for your consideration is June 3rd 2004 entitled “Fat Dude Loves Summer Pt. 1” I couldn’t find part 2, I don’t think he has written it yet, but I want to read it when he does.

This is a raunchy blog, almost exclusively grumpy, (check out the Friday Rants), contains a lot of “guy” humor, and is a pretty good time.

Fat Eye For The Skinny Guy