“BLOG” seems to be, quite unmistakably, the current title of this blog. There it is, at the top of a plainly grey page, with the content starting immediately beneath. A minimalist approach, and one which suggests a deliberate expression of solid, uninteresting dreariness. But just a bit too deliberate, too solid, too plain, and too grey, to be mistaken for a sign that this will be a boring blog. Yet that is exactly what it is.
Anna, the author of the blog, doesn’t seem to have much to say. Most of the entries on the current page are just short comments on things like school work and web stuff. The very few, longer entries don’t do enough to improve matters. She doesn’t tell her readers about things. All she does is state and comment. For a month’s worth of writing, this is really quite disappointing.
The design of the page, however, is pretty good. The layout is pleasingly simple and clear. The grey background is, perhaps, a little dark for the black text, but I did not find this a problem. There are no archives, though, and really nothing on the page but the blog. The only links (apart from a very few in the entries) are some links for contacting the author at the bottom of each entry. It is, indeed, a nicely minimalist design.
There doesn’t, at first, seem to be much more to the rest of the site, other than a guestbook. But that is not so. Or, at least, Anna has a lot of work in progress. What I did manage to find was a temporary home page (stating that the relaunch date for the site is 12th May, 2002), and a page of (sometimes broken) links. The links page does suffer the rather obvious problem of having grey text on a grey background, though. Fortunately, almost all of the links are graphical.
Overall, I would say this blog is not worth visiting. The lack of content is what lets Anna’s efforts down. Even those with a particular interest in online teenage diaries will find it disappointing. Perhaps Anna’s blog has a small role to play in her online social life, but that’s about it. A lot more effort in the writing is needed.
b r e a t h l e s s