Author: admin

I needed a Flash plugin, so the first thing I saw on this page was a fullpage popup. Closing that, I get on with Schmutzie. The layout is big and red and beautiful, and apparently Schmutzie designed it herself. It’s one of the best layouts I’ve seen – mostly text, clean, and eye-catching.

The blog is called “Milkmoney or not, here I come,” but the page itself says “Sticking One Toe In At A Time.” Both are sort of the average, cutesy titles you could expect from almost any site, which tell you nothing about the author or the content of the site. Personal weblogs, however, even though mostly solipsistic, cover such a range of topics that in most cases it’s good to be ambiguous to a degree.

It turned out to be a fluke, but I thought it was a bad sign that the first entry was one of those lists of 200 things where you have to bold the ones you have done. Schmutzie, a married Canadian woman, has never touched an
iceberg. But she’s milked a cow. Her sitemeter tells me she’s only had 7,400 readers since August, but it seems often that far-inferior weblogs with better networking skills get ten times the hits with 1/10th of the content.

Her entries are essay-long, and always contain plenty of information about the lobes of the brain, freed lab rabbits, and the French word for dandelion (³pissenlit²).

Some gems:
“Brown twine is comforting and right.”
“When I found myself absentmindedly etching a caricature of myself into the side of the tub
during a bath, I knew that I had let that one go too far. I mean, I was actually naked and soaking in hot water inside a container I would not have fed a dog out of.”

I’ve found this blog fascinating, and I can’t usually swallow personal weblogs. Most make you feel like a child that’s wandered into the middle of a movie theater. The author is intelligent, and her writing makes her seem approachable and friendly. The mistake most personal weblog authors make with friendliness is that every entry reads as a
continuation of a story, without exposition or reference. I could read Schmutzie backwards, entry by entry, if I wanted (and I just might) and still get it.milkmoney or not, here I come

The first thing you notice about Less Than Daily is the big monkey in background (the blog is named Less Than Daily, but the domain name is monkeysandpirates.com, hmm) which I found pretty funny. The faded background on the text boxes is also a nice touch.

The blog is written by mcphee (or just phee) a self proclaimed geek, roleplayer, ninja (no really, he is has a 7th Kyu ninjitsu grading – or better) who recently decided he needed a blog, the title he says: ‘ideally I’d update this daily, but that’s not going to happen, hence the title of the blog.’
Most of his entries involve his mates : Pixie, Mojo, Mark A and/or his girlfriend Claire. If you read enough entries you get a feel for the different personalities in his life. The content has an interesting assortment of material, such as: playing on Ebay, the Eminem gig, football (go Liverpool!), Ninjas fighting Tigers (or at least Monks fighting Leopards), his ever expanding DVD collection, incredibly shrinking chocolate pudding, Everquest, time travel, web browsers. Lots of geeky goodness. Occasionally you’ll see some funny comic strip monkeys (entitled ‘Monkeys Like Us’) with dialogue from his life. I thought they were pretty funny.

The author does put some time into this blog, the Monkeys Like Us strip has made it to V2.0 and the author mentioned several blog upgrades in functionality or design. The writing is good, the author has a good sense of humour and shares his many stories quite well. I enjoyed reading Less Than Daily, it wasn’t rocket science but I found it light and enjoyable.

Monkeys, ninja, ninjuries and good reads, need I say more? Check it out.
Less Than Daily

Redemption Blues is offered as a personal journal, and helpfully lists the meaning of the title for you to ponder on – which you will if you take the time to delve into the six months of available archives. The author, Chameleon, has also taken the time to provide a link to the short story she has written of the same title, although, of course, I am not reviewing that, and shall leave that to you, dear reader.

The blog itself is very well written, and contains many posts relating to daily occurences in the author’s life – the post pertaining to the wiseness of her four year old son sticks out in my mind, as do various commentaries regarding the political and social situation in Scotland, of which I am fortunately well-versed. This by no means should be taken as meaning that you may have to have some prior knowledge, I only point it out as a subject that could be interesting for you to learn more of, and what easier way than through a real person’s experiences?

There are a smattering of evocative personal photos in the sidebar, lending a little more to the whole experience, and the lay-out is quite simple and clean. As mentioned previously, there is a link to the short story of the same title, and I’d recommend taking a look, if only to check out the highly descriptive style.

I enjoyed the read, and would encourage those who can understand “big words” to take a dive into the archives. This is most definitely not a blog for those who who type in text speak. Overall, I enjoyed the writer’s style, and did have a few things to mull over after I’d finished perusing. Very thought-provoking.

Works well in both Firefox 0.10 and IE 6.

Redemption Blues

So, this is a good read.

Written by a a proud feminist Mom of a belly-pierced teen diva who’s turning out just fine, thank you, I Am Dr. Laura’s Worst Nightmare talks about a variety of subjects like her favorite restaurants in Santa Cruz, her teen daughter (like any mother would), modern parenting (her definition of) and music. My initial thoughts were Thank God, it isn’t a blogger account!, but that’s just me. Delving a little deeper, I found myself laughing pretty often, especially when she talked about her daughter and Dr. Laura in particular.

Now, this blog hasn’t been in operation for very long–about two months. But the content produced so far is quite intriguing and downright funny. She’s pro-Kerry, and talks about politics a lot. She even has a counter that tabs the cost of the war in Iraq. Works kind of like the national debt counter and moves about as quick. She also has pictures, and the blog design itself is Movable Type. Really clean and easy to read.

Of course, she rails Dr. Laura. And that might be one of the most interesting points. She doesn’t seem to be able to stand the Doctor, but finds herself agreeing with her on some points. Example: spying on her daughter’s blog. According to Dr. Laura, this behavior is only warranted if you feel that something is really wrong with your children. However, this blogger checks on her daughter’s weblog in a now and again routine fashion, citing the reason to make sure Molly and her peeps haven’t set up a meth lab somewhere on the property. Fascinating. I’m glad I didn’t have a weblog when I was thirteen.

All in all, I give this blog a 4 out of 5. The design is great, the read is fascinating, and when she develops more content over the coming months, I’ll be curious to see how her blog has taken on more definition. Good job.I Am Dr. Laura’s Worst Nightmare

“Ducking for Apples” (A country girl in the city) Those were the headlines I saw when the page first loaded. When I first heard the main title, the first thing I thought of was Halloween. So I really wasn’t sure what kind of a blog I would be faced with.

The template was yet another one of those original, familiar Blogspot templates. The layout was very simple.

Ally (the author) is a self employed lady from the “United Kingdom”. She has only had the blog running since July of 2004. Ally’s entries consist of her job, her family ,friends and just everyday life. On a couple of those entries, she has written out phone conversations which she has had. One with a caller who apparently had a wrong number, and a conversation she has had with her mother via telephone. In their own way, I found those two entries fairly amusing, therefore showing Ally’s sense of humor. I am really not sure if they were meant to be amusing, but that’s the way I saw them.

As I stated earlier, the blog has only been around since July, so there really wasn’t that much content to go through. But however, I did enjoy what was there.

She has several links on the right hand side of her page. There is one particular link titled “the crew”. I clicked on that first and it was little pieces of info about each member of her family, her husband, friends etc. I found that one link especially to be quite interesting. It is not something you usually see on your everyday blog. However, I was somewhat disappointed to find that a few of her links were not in working order.

In my opinion, this is a blog worth checking out from time to time. Ally has a way of writing her entries that will keep you interested. As her blog progresses in time, I am sure she will fix up her links and maybe do some work on her design. Because of the non working links and because of the newness of the blog, I am giving it a score of 3. But in the future, if she would like to re submit it, I think it has the potential to get a score of a 5.
ducking for apples