Author: admin

As a new reviewer, I’m not familiar enough with xanga’s blog templates to know if eeore’s is a standard design, but it is legible and pretty easy to navigate through. This is a very british blog: Jeremy is from the U.K. (his photos indicate a large metropolitan area) and writes with the slang and inside jokes unique to that side of ‘the big ditch’.
Jeremy writes openly and honestly of his vices and attempts to quit them, he’s apparently now giving up cigarettes after claiming to give up marijauna. He has not been blogging at xanga for too long, and there is a definate difference in his writing styles from his first posts to his last. Looks like he either quit smoking pot, or discovered spellcheck… Much of the space in his blog is taken up with ongoing discussions with his friends and readers. There seems to be a great deal of back and forth concerning feuds and other blogsites, which I found mildly interesting at first, then somewhat tedious. He has a close-knit clique, and without being part of it personally, the references and inside jokes were lost on the casual reader.
His sidepanels feature cartoons that I’m guessing he’s drawn, some quite funny. He is a self-proclaimed poet with links to his poetry, some of which is quite well thought out and expressed. The opening page appears a bit ‘busy’ or crowded, but not overly difficult to read.

Overall he seems to fill a niche with his readers, he’s quite prolific and opinionated about a lot of topics, and seems well liked by his peers. He’s listed as an artistic blog, but despite the cartoons and poetry, I considered this much more of a personal blog. It’s a peek into an Englishman’s life, not badly written, but not edge of the seat fascinating either.eeore’s missing tale

Firstly, this blog is clear and crisp in it’s design. With a white background it’s easy on the eyes. Although, the orange and red seem to work as the backgrounds for the text. The title “less than daily” gives the impression that the author doesn’t update every day.

Reading through the rest of the site, you quickly find that the author is either a cartoonist or loves cartoons as there are several references to strips as well as there being imbedded images of cartoon strips.

The actual content of the blog wasn’t very interesting to a reader outside his knowledgeable friends. As a new reader, there is no content in this blog that would keep me coming back for more. Although there are the odd one-liners that got a smile out of me.

There are a few links along the top side of the banner. Most work. The “about me” link doesn’t work, nor is there any little blurb about himself anywhere. The author has links to various other comic strip sites as well as his friends blog links.

Overall this blog is basically about a role playing “geek”, by his own terminology, who likes cartoons as well. The blog doesn’t really catch ones eye, either in written content or imagination, but it is still young and might develop as the author does. Less Than Daily

mcphee, author of this blog, and who insists on no capitilisation on that, is a role-playing, football obsessed, geek, and describes himself as such in his first post. The blog is pretty personal, and seems mostly aimed towards friends in the earlier archives, and not what I would describe as particularly geeky. REAL geeks would say they’re a nerd, naturally, and would also have that whole robots.txt deal down pat.

There wasn’t much in the way of terribly interesting subjects to grab me in the archives, and it lacked a certain sparkle. There are cartoons posted on a regular basis made by mcphee featuring humourous conversations between a pair of monkeys, but even this didn’t particularly encourage me, and not enough to return to read it again, I’m afraid. Not even the post regarding Mike Reid, either, sorry, and I do agree he’s a git!

The layout itself isn’t particularly practical, more posts to a page would have been ideal, as there are currently 29 pages of archives to trawl through, and no quick way round it either – although the entire collection of monkey cartoons are available seperately by clicking their image in the header.

I think this blog could benefit from a few minor changes to the layout, as mentioned previously, and I understand that the content may be interesting to similarly minded persons, but it just didn’t inspire me at all. I will indeed be returning less than daily.

Less Than Daily

Hurray, I thought when I finally saw this users profile – after two full minutes of waiting for a response from Modblog’s server.

I say ‘Hurray’, because it’s a fellow South African blog. It’s good to see blogging taking off around the world, and of course that’s why we’re here.

Now that I have established this bloggers nationality, now I have to try and figure out more about them. This in itself is quite a difficult task, as it’s incredibly complex to read, not visually, but grammatically. Lest I begin to sound like my matric English teacher, I move on.

Modblog does allow for some cool features, most of which this blogger is making use of – i.e. the photo gallery, the daily poll comment box, user profile etc. He has also moved away from the standard templates offered by Modblog, by tweaking the html to reflect personal colour choices, some great smoothing effects and many of his own ‘anime’ type images. Very nice.

This blogger is somewhat of an amateur cartoonist, and uses his blog to show some of his work, since I am by no means a cartoonist, I won’t begin to judge his work, other than to say that I don’t get the joke.

Modblog archives previous posts in a different style to most blogging services since they are not filed by date, but by category, and scanning through them – I realise that they make no sense at all, and having tried to click on these links with two different web browsers and having no success, I suggest that this blogger chat to his blog service about this.

I find very little of interest in this blog, but honestly feel were I a 17 yr old boy, part of this bloggers captive audience, and into Anime that I may have thought this blog great. Since there has been some effort on this bloggers part to ‘beautify’ his blog, I feel it deserves a rating of 2.5.Reviewed by a Retard.

Am I a lucky reviewer or what? Corgan Dane ROCKS! I’d advise that you get his autograph, now, so we don’t make him late for his date with destiny. This young man is going places! He’s not just toe-dabbling in the prose pond, he’s making a big cannonball leap, and I predict he’ll make a helluva splash.

This is his personal blog: it includes links to 2 previous self-designed websites that are well worth visiting. Watching him evolve as a writer, cartoonist, and designer feels a lot like seeing a behind-the-scenes documentary called Birth of an Author. At the age of 24 he’s already showing a great deal of wit and wisdom, and seems to have something interesting to say about a variety of topics. Even the more mundane semi-rants about school, traffic, and cyberspace seem fresh and entertaining through Corgan’s eyes and words. There is a powerful will to write expressed in everything he does, and he shows a real grasp on the nuances of the English language. He has a knack for side-stepping the pitfalls so many of us bloggers are prone to, such as the serializing of dull events, the aimless aggrandizing and self-conscience soul searches we do to fill up pages. He shows a refreshingly uncynical ability to poke fun at himself and others without whining, or smirking.

His design is a fairly simple blogspot template: easy to read, logical, and grammatically correct. His more experimental efforts are seen on his previous pages, which are easily linked along with other things that amuse or entertain him. He’s also a cartoonist and poet, with examples of all his work very accessible from this blog. He’s kept the main page quite free of anything that might distract from his focus, his writing. There is enough personal information everywhere to get the impression that he’s a pretty cool guy with a very busy life and a real passion for writing.

A few of the standouts in my memory are his recent entries titled American Dream, Winter Species, Internet Crack, and I Just Like Stuff. Each of those writings demonstrate a different facet of his style from introspective to humorous, and very few of his entries bogged down the reader at all. I found myself totally absorbed in his pages, following every single link and even reading all the poetry he’s written for a college class. He plans to write his second novel in November during the National Novel Writers Month and I plan to read it as he blogs it… this is a guy with ambition!

I believe that with just a bit more seasoning we’ll be seeing Corgan Dane on the New York Times Bestsellers list and I’m looking forward to reading and hearing a lot more from him. “Bob-On” Mr. Dane, may I have your autograph on this napkin please?The Annoyances, Grievances, and Misc. Happiness of Corgan Dane