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Ahhh, to be a goddess (or god…)! One day I hope to wake up and be on the golden throne with my scepter, until then I’ll have to be content living vicariously through Erica.

An impressive site and blog. The author opens her heart and shares it with the web. The sincerity, candor and honesty of her blog is refreshing and makes for an engaging read. There is well over a years worth of entries, and she blogs nearly every day. So, you can really get to know this author quite well and you’ll want to…

Reading the blog it becomes apparent how important family and friends are to the author. The entries express her feeling about the people in her life, she also touches on writing (she is writing a novel!), life stories, sexual curiosity, lessons learned and day-to-day observations. (Great taste in music as well IMHO) 🙂

A Sample of Erica’s blog:

“A conversation I had with an old friend of mine on Saturday led to a huge epiphany concerning the roles of other people in my life. Generally speaking, it is really hard for me to make good friends, like the kind you keep in touch with no matter what happens. Surprisingly enough, given my general standoffish attitude towards people, I have a couple of these close friends. Friendships are a high priority in my life…without them, I’d be an extremely lonely person, kinda like my mother. I see her go to work, come home, sleep…go to work, come home, sleep…and that’s it. I never see her do anything other than the mundane, everyday activities that make up a so-called normal person’s life. Nobody calls her, she doesn’t go out on her days off, she doesn’t invite anyone over. Other than me and one or two extended family members, she is quite alone.”

There are far too many excellent entries to post… I recommend discovering them for yourself. Without question, one of the best written and inspiring blogs I’ve read. A highly recommended read. My you never lose contact with your muse.
Vox Deam: The Voice of the Goddess

This was the first travel-type weblog I’ve ever seen, let alone reviewed.

Our author takes us through his many journeys over the past years, traveling from all over Asia, South America, and Australia starting back in February of 2002.

The first entry started out on the flight to Delhi. Rhymer gives us information about the passengers he meets on the plane and those he encounters in the airport. I’ve always felt like airports and any group of people traveling are just thousands of stories waiting to be written, and Rhymer certainly takes advantage of these opportunities.



The menu of different travel entries you can choose from have a “P” in front of the entries, indicating there are supposed to be pictures in these entries. Finding the photos wasn’t as easy as it sounded, or maybe I just wasn’t thinking. It was until I started randomly clicking on things that I found the yellow arrow next to the word photos was actually a link to the photo section of each entry. And come to find out all of the little yellow triangles are different ways to navigate around the site.

After figuring everything out, I found Rhymer.net to be full of all kinds of information. You learn about not only the cultures and geography of foreign places you may never get to visit yourself, but you also get the chance to read about a traveler’s experiences, both good and bad, that give you an overall view of what it’s like to be in a different country. I, for one, don’t have any plans in the near future to do this kind of extensive traveling, so personally, this site was an educational experience of the utmost.

Rhymer’s writing, while very informative, is also very casual. Instead of reading like a tour guide pamphlet, Rhymer.net does read like an actual journal, making it an interesting to check back in on as Rhymer continues his travels around the world.

rhymer.net

I liked this site as soon as I entered. It wasn’t fussy or overcrowded and has just about everything you’d want in a site: clean layout, very readable posts, a thorough “about” section, some good links and even poetry.

In writing about his daily life, Amor covers a lot of subjects: love, religion, girls, friends, and goes from funny to thought provoking. Some favourites, that give an idea of the variety, are “Radio Flyer” descibing an incident in a toy store and “Amor in Review”. I was surprised to read a recent post in which Amor writes of his feelings for a girl and says, “she’s probably going to read this.” Most people edit what they write when they know that those close to them will be reading, but this constant openness is one of the real gifts of the site.

The layout, in popular blues, greys and whites, is simple to navigate and although it is unadventurous, it looks very clean and professional. There is a good space for the blog, so the writing is not cramped, and the top navigation bar allows you to move around the sections easily. There is also a column for archives, photos and external links. The photos are accompanied by amusing captions, such as, “Virgil was just testing out his new digital camera. I was testing out my new silly grin. I think it needs more grin and less silly.” Another column has pictures of, and links to, the books, games and music that Amor is currently using, which allows you to see even more into the life of the author.

Through his weblog, Amor comes across as warm, friendly and fun. His refreshing honesty and straight-forward writing style make this an attractive read and really warmed me to him. The site had me rooting for him and made me want to return over and over.Amor said

By far, this is the most aptly titled blog I’ve ever read. At first glance Someone Called James seems like it would be a short read, being only two months old, but James has done a lot of writing in the last two months, pretty enjoyable writing at that.

James, an 18 year old living in the United Kingdom describes why he started his blog in his first entry as; “I just want somewhere to ramble on about my life, my thoughts, my feelings – infact just me in general.” Which is pretty much why we all started our weblogs. The differance between most weblogs and James’s, is that his is pretty interesting and at times, even though the author probably doesn’t realize it, is pretty gosh darn funny. In his January 2nd entry James writes about the breakup with his longtime girlfriend and how he has still remained good friends with her; “But i suppose in a way we never split up. We just stopped having sex – perhaps we got married when I wasn’t looking.” That comment is just hilarious!

Although this blog is only two months old, James is quite a prolific writer, I spent just as much time reading this weblog as I did reading weblogs that have been around for five or six months. There is no “About” section or “FAQ”, but by just reading this weblog’s entries for the last two months I felt I kind of knew who the author was. I think I found out more about him than an FAQ or “About” section could provide by just reading the blog. How rare is that?

The author doesn’t just talk about his own personal issues though, in his January 17th entry he takes the British media to task: “Maybe if they stopped moaning and looked at themselves, they would realise that the problem with Britain today isn’t asylum seakers, or rising crime, or the imaginary persecution of the ‘middle classes’, but the bigoted attitudes they encourage daily.”

The site design is user friendly, easy to read, I had no trouble navigating it, and had no trouble getting to the archives. There were no broken links.

I’m giving Someone Called James at 3.5, even though its only a couple months old, because this blog seems like a “true” journal. The author writes candidly about his personal life, its entertaining, and I enjoyed his dry humor. In a few months when there is more content this weblog will probably be a “five”. This journal has a pretty gosh darn good start. Three and a half stars, check it out.

someonecalledjames

Brandon, the author and creator of The Chirish Website, is a high school senior, and a self-admitted computer geek. A lot of his posts deal with high school life or that “geeky coding stuff” he seems to enjoy so much. Posting what you like or what you enjoy is usually what defines a weblog, and it does just that.

In all honesty, there were many entries I read where I had absolutely no idea what was going on or who was being talked about. However, I’m sure that the people Brandon addresses in these posts know exactly what’s happening. It’s just one of those very personal weblogs where you might actually have to know the author to “get it”.

This is a relatively new weblog to join the ranks of the thousands and thousands out there. Brandon’s only been keeping this weblog since mid-December 2002, but he’s already put a lot of evident hard work and time into the site, both the programming behind it as well as always adding more and more sections to peruse while visiting the site.

The site design is extremely functional and very easy to use/navigate. The different shades of blue all look pleasant together. It’s simple to tell what may be a link and what’s not and there’s not much to try and question when looking at the design. It’s very straight forward and works great for Brandon’s weblog and the rest of the sections of his site.

These sections are also a great addition to the site and definitely worth checking out while you’re there. The games portion of it literally kept me occupied for hours. All I needed was more things to keep me planted in front of the computer and the links Brandon has available to online games definitely did just that.

The Chirish Website is definitely one that focuses solely around Brandon’s personal life. While the biggest part of the site deals with what’s going on in his life on a daily basis, by following it for a while you begin to feel like you quite possibly fit right in to his daily routine. I would suggest checking this site out just to see if Brandon’s the kind of guy you’d like to keep tabs on from day to day.

chirish.com