Author: admin

When I sat down today to do my review, the title of the blog I was going to delve into gave me an unsure feeling about what I was going to be reading. “Flirty Kitty” conjured up visions of the stereotypical flighty high school girl who was going to prattle on about her latest crush, her clothes, her clique of friends, and other things that I wouldn’t be able to identify with at all.

Boy, was I wrong

When I opened the page, my preconceived notions were automatically voided by the header, “The Misadventures Of Erotic Writer Tara Alton”. My interest was automatically piqued and I jumped into the blog with both feet.

The blog layout is the standard blogger template which, honestly, isn’t important to me at all if the content of the weblog is great – which this one is. The fact that a ganeric blogger template is used quickly becomes a null and void fact once you start reading.

The blog is written by the afore-mentioned “Tara Alton”, a fascinating woman from Michigan who is an erotic writer by night and a corporate travel agent by day. She tells hilarious tales of her daily life and she literally had me laughing out loud at points. She has the incredible talent of making even the most mundane of events entertaining, and it’s a skill too often lost on many bloggers.

She talks about her workplace, with co-workers like Crazy Jane (whose sole goal in life is to own a hot-dog cart). She talks about her pets – who with names like Miss Smarty Pants and Fiona take on a life seemingly all their own. She talks about her erotic writing (which can be sampled from a link on her page… which, incidentally, is great). She talks about her incredible crush on, of all things, a cupcake. She talks of and shows pictures of her Barbie collection doing things and having the life she only dreams of. This, and so much more, is what makes up the charming and ever-so-quirky personality of the author. Maybe it is because of my own eccentricities, but I immediately connected with this author and found myself ridiculously disappointed when I came to the last of her entries.

I found the blog to be an immensely entertaining and engrossing read, and it’s actually going to make it to my personal list of frequently visited sites. My hat’s off to the author for an exceptional read and you have now garnered yourself a loyal fan. It is for this reason, I give Flirty Kitty my first perfect 5/5.Flirty Kitty

Deadly Cupcake was submitted to TWR as a ‘humor’ site, so I took this to mean this site would be funny. But this site isn’t a ‘humor’ site. It is a 16-year-old young man’s site. I managed to find an archive of video clips that Phil (the owner of Deadly Cupcake) thinks are funny. The videos are SNL clips, things that have been circulating the Internet for years and years, and yes, some of these are indeed funny. From time to time, he also posts one of those stories about stupid criminals or other Einstein Award related tales. Humorous, yes. Humor site, no.

Phil has been reincarnating the Deadly Cupcake site since he was in the 6th grade. It is now in its third re-design, and Phil has reached high school. The site itself isn’t unappealing in its design. It has a black background, white type and a nice masthead with links for archives, the video clips and the like. Phil puts his name and the date he posted above the post itself as in “Posted by Phil Sat Sept 18.” I would hazard to guess that roughly 98 percent of blog readers are also accustomed to seeing the ‘Posted by” line come after the post. This makes his posts somewhat confusing.

Phil loves Lacey Chabert, the actress. He also talks about movies he’s seen or movies that will be released soon. He gives his opinion of music. He talks about the Teen Choice Awards. He joined the chess club recently. It’s as if you can peek inside a 16-year-old’s brain and see all the wheels turning.

While not what I’d call a must-read for anyone over, let’s say 20, it is impressive. If you’re a teen, give Deadly Cupcake a look.
Deadly Cupcake III

When “Incurable Hippie’s Musings and Rants” into my Internet Explorer window, there was absolutely no question about the title of this weblog. The font for the title is massive in size and is by far the first thing that a reader sees. Right away, the author describes herself as a “mad, in debt, feminist, radical, angry, pacifist, warrior, flower-power chick”, though, so that struck a chord with me and almost instantaneously gave me the desire to read more.



The author’s musings and rants fill the six months of archives with enough information to get to know her quite well. Every once in a while, readers will find a post or two where the author has written about a day-trip with a friend to another city or a poem she’s written herself. The majority of the posts throughout the archives are mainly the author’s observations on the world and news around her, instead of things that are happening directly in her life. As with any weblog, readers will also find the obligatory, yet thankfully just occasional, posts containing the results of “What ________ are you?” quizzes.



The author not only can make her sea monkeys come alive, but apparently they live a long time and she considers them pets. On a personal note, this amazed me because my sea monkeys never grew and that’s disappointing, because I already had names for them. This weblog author also shares stories of her hamsters. Normally, pet stories become tiresome, but with hamsters, these aren’t quite the same run-of-the-mill “I Love My Cat” stories that bloggers often abuse.



Located in the United Kingdom, the author only occasionally touches on the political side of things, either in Europe or the events taking place in the United States. She touches on topics in more serious nature, too, like living with a mental disoder or eating and dieting habits, for example.



Visually, the site layout looks to be that of a Blogger template, just slightly altered to the creator’s liking. The title is in a very large font, as previously mentioned. The sidebar on the site is full of typically blogging-type things: the monthly archives, a few of the latest entries, the author’s favorite links, various webrings, etc. Very basic colors of black, white, light gray, and blue are chosen for the site, and these colors are all aesthetically pleasing.



Six months isn’t very long in the wide world of weblogging, but this author has very early on made her weblog appears as one that can be counted on for a variety of topics to be discussed. Since we all know variety is the spice of life, this Incurable Hippie’s Musings and Rants are ones that can enjoyably be read by nearly any random reader.


Incurable Hippie’s Musings and Rants

“MaFt” originally started “a new thing” in July ’04 to, as he wrote, document what new thing he learns every day, an idea that he borrowed from his brother who never followed through with the plan. A weblog that’s actually written for the purpose of learning something was honestly not a concept I’d ever seen or enjoyed.

With my American grammar upbringing, I found it sometimes difficult to adapt to the word “learnt“, but that is one of the great joys of reading weblog from all over the world. Each time MaFt posts, it’s about something that he’d learnt that day, whether it be something like the exact definition of the word learn, as he did in one of his earlier posts, or something more enhanced and deep like … well, there aren’t any of what I would call deep or prophetic tidbits of information that’ve been posted to date.

It only took a mere two weeks before MaFt was worried he might not learn anything new that day, but, lo and behold, he learnt the price for a pint of beer at a new bar. The things that are learnt on a regular basis are rarely things that can be discovered out of a textbook or through some type of studying. Finding out that someone has an infection in their leg, discovering that a pack of ketchup was made in Holland, and learning the words and music to a song are a few of the many different examples of things the author learns and posts about daily.

The layout of the site is quite drab. It’s done in a black font on a gray background, with the only hint of real color being a bright green in the logo that’s shoved in the top left corner of the site. Running along the sidebar are the obligatory links to other sites, the archives that are listed by the week, and a tagboard for random visitors to leave messages.

As a reviewer, I always feel it’s important to find one thing about a site that would make readers want to come back. With “a new thing”, I was unable to do that. The posts are written in a very choppy manner, where it’s often hard to fully understand what the author is talking about or exactly what he means. The things he does learn aren’t really things most readers will find educational or even enjoyable, because these things pertain solely to the author’s personal life or experiences.

Some weblogs aren’t meant for the general public, simply because they don’t draw readers in and make them want to return. Weblogs like “a new thing” are better suited for people that know the author on a personal basis and know the background information on so many of the topics he does discuss.

a new thing

The background of this site (ModBlog – Thoughts on paper) as it loaded took me back to about seven years ago, when I first got the idea of using a notebook paper image as my background… because, well, that’s the image that’s used as a background here. Despite that, the black and white sketch of a warrior on a mountain, and the big orange modblog banner, I was able to concentrate on fairly reviewing the actual weblog content of the site. Once I found the beginning of the site, that is.

As with any site hosted blog (Blogger, LiveJournal, et al. ), users aren’t really allotted a lot of freedom when it comes to layouts and organization of the archives of their site. Readers have to click through about four pages of archives before being able to find out where and when Taylor, the author, first started blogging here, which was April 4, 2004. Without much introduction or a very extensive “about” page, it doesn’t appear that Taylor just jumped on the blogging bandwagon in April.

Taylor writes very well. Quite often, I forget that I’m reading the blog of a 16-year-old. In fact, it sometimes takes posts spelling out the fact that this author is still in high school to remind me. “I know the skills are there they have gotten me awards, but that is another story that involves going through my life in the 6th and 7th grade,” he writes in a post about wanting to sit down a write a song. In the same post, he writes in detail about The Who’s Tommy album, which again isn’t really typical teenager blog fodder.

There are posts that are filled with typical teen angst, but instead of what could be deemed as a whiny post; Taylor expresses his angst via a song/poem that he’s written himself. These bits of expression can be found throughout the weblog, and do a nice job of breaking up regular entries.

Of course, his current entries have been dealing with a harassing person or group of people that have been leaving comments of sorts on Taylor’s site that he’s found offensive. Unfortunately, in the weblogging world, that will always be something that happens, and hopefully Taylor will be able to find a way around ignoring the harassment and continuing on with this weblog.

While this weblog probably isn’t one that the average web surfer will stumble upon and truly enjoy, it is one that is probably best fitting for readers around Taylor’s age and a bit older. Readers that are older than Taylor will be able to enjoy a few posts, but will then probably run out of commonalities or interests, just as they would outside of the weblogging world.
ModBlog – Thoughts on paper