Author: admin

Life with Rashed is a new blog, and it looks like Rashed still hasn’t quite figured out what he wants the site to be. Of course, I don’t really know if Rashed is the author, there is no bio info or author email, a personal pet peeve of mine.

The site looks nice, with pleasing tones and the ability to change the colors in the skin by pressing a button. There are a lot of images, and for the most part they are clip-arty. Just about every post has an image.

It could be this is a first effort at blogging and websites, and Rashed is having a good time with it. There are some flash movies on another page, and an empty forum. Presumably the link to register allows you to comment in the forum, but this wasn’t clear.

The writing is all over the place, and I’m not really sure who the audience for this blog might be. There are surveys completed by the author, some poems and random thoughts. Particularly bothersome is the post on smoking saving folks from cancer. Someday Rashed may find a better direction for the blog, but for now, it comes off as a project and not as thoughts from an individual. There’s nothing of interest here for me.NULL

I had no sense of what “What doesn’t kill you…” would be about, but the current post plunges the reader into some general ramblings. The next post on the page is rather more personal and is part of a longer story line about the writer’s current sex partner/love interest. The details are explicit, the tone is engaging and after just a few minutes, I was hooked.

The writing style is relaxed and personal. WDKY’s personality shows through his writing. He is a divorced 45-year-old man with a couple of kids living outside of London. He is frank and expresses himself clearly. The blog is his personal story. He occasionally comments on blogging in general and points readers to sites he enjoys, but the interest here is in the serial novel that is his life. I have a particular fondness for this type of blogging (it’s essentially what I do, minus the sex) and I was drawn to WDKY’s story. His enjoyment and discussion of blogging is refreshing.

Apparently, while the site has only been used regularly for a little less than two months, it has gone through a few redesigns. I’m not particularly fond of the current design. I’m not sure what the skyline at the top of the page has to do with the content of the site. Also, I don’t like white type on a black background; I find it harder to read than black text on a light background. The author has included a tag board on the sidebar and a few links and badges, but there is nothing remarkable here. However, the design is not the reason to visit this site. The reason to visit the site is the content, which is excellent.

For great storytelling and clear, interesting writing, this is a fine blog. There is a lot of writing about sex, but it’s not a sex blog. It’s about the author’s personal life and his thoughts on dating and the world in general. If you like personal blogs, I highly recommend it.NULL

I love to read and I love to write and when I read the title I thought this could be a really cool blog on a writer’s life and his thoughts on creativity and stuff, kind of a Paul Auster’s book, perhaps? – although I realize I’d be expecting a bit too much. Or maybe an editor’s life and how it’s great to get to read all these books and choose what’s going to be published or not and tell to the writer’s face their book is really awesome or is just a piece of shit (pardon my French) and that they shouldn’t have spent so much energy and paper and electricity on keeping the computer on to write such things.

So, hey, yeah!, I was right! David is an editor! Not the coold editor type, but still. By reading his profile, we get to know that David likes Queen (the band, yes) and is the editor of the North Cheshire Family Historian. Oh, great. That should be fun to read. Maybe some funny family stories, murders, births, the whole life and death mystery revealed through anonymous people’s stories. But I’m sorry to say this blog is not about that. Mostly, it’s about churches – with pictures -, churchyards, and guess? Cheshire. Of course the only one I know from Cheshire would be the cat, from ‘Alice in the Wonderland’, so I don’t think that would enough to get my attention. Here and there a note about being an editor, but not that interesting either. Okay, to be fair, it’s about David’s life and what he does.

The layout is a basic Blogger template. All the links work fine. There’s not a lot of material to read, since the blog is recent. And there’s nowhere to comment on the posts (you never know if someone would be really interested in checking people’s graves inscriptions – and there might be), but you can e-mail with David if you wish.

All in all, the blog is just plain unappealing, I’m afraid. I’d love to say otherwise, but I’m being totally honest. Maybe it’s just that it’s meant to be read by people who dig the same things David does, and I’m not one of them, unfortunately. NULL

So, yeah, I guess the title says it all. Not that Adam actually rants about anything, but it’s a blog filled with personal posts (even though it’s under the entertainment category in the weblogreview thing) and it’s written – now, guess! – by some Adam guy.

And I say “some Adam guy” not as a way to diminish him, but because you cannot easily find any information about him. There’s no profile to be read. I know he’s Irish, I know he studies something and I know he’s been in love with Jennie. That he fancies jokes – blonde jokes and the kind, which you can read in separate pages he keeps – and babes. And those are the things I could pick up by reading his first entries and the last ones.

The layout is quite simple but very nice. All links work okay. There are some categories he came up with, but they are rather irrelevant in my opinion (well, they may be useful if you want to skip posts on babes). There’s an RSS feeder thing, which is cool. Uncool: “read more” link. You’re reading the post, you want to read more and suddenly you realize you have to click there to continue with the reading. And that takes you to another page, where there’s only one post and if you want to come back to the main page, click here again, mate. So… tiring. Or I’m just being picky.

I know I might made Adam sound sound like an uninteresting person –or at least made his blog sound like an uninteresting blog- , but he’s not. I wouldn’t say I’d read his blog often, but that’s only because personal blogs are that way. You either fall for the person at first sight or not. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad blog, although I can assure it’s not a wonderful blog either.
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I liked the catchy subtitle this blog has: The darker side of technology, it’s fun over here… I skimmed over it a little and I was a little disappointed at the infrequent rate the author updates this blog. There are posts where months come by before a new one is made. I always believed in regular posting.

The blog content itself is quite interesting. It’s about the personal life of the author, Shadow. His profile says he is an avid gamer and computer-user and there are things here that talk about his projects and goals in that area. I found a little hard to follow the posts he had mainly because of their infrequency. The posts are well-written, with proper grammar and mostly correct spelling – kudos for that – and they can be quite interesting.

The design is very simple, nothing fancy but it is organized, and that’s good. The black background definitely complements the author’s name (or pseudonym).

Overall, it’s definitely among the above-average blogs out there. But there’s not much that stands out. That could be a goal, or maybe there isn’t a goal after all other than as a place to write thoughts and other whatnots.NULL