As soon as my modem finished gathering the relevant information for the starting page of Adversity I was already impressed. Unique, clean, and descriptive it had everything I needed to know about the site displayed in front of me over the map of the British underground. I immediately clicked on the bio of the author, hoping desperately to get a background before I started on the weblog. The description of the author, Blair, despite being brief was enough for me to start with, I at least knew whether or not she was male or female and what some of her strong beliefs were, it makes reviewing a blog so much easier.
After reading a little I noticed how strong and opinionated the blog was, and not just your normal whining but direct, precise and informative opinions. I found this style of blogging refreshing and quite digestible and you can really see that the author certainly has some writing ability as I found myself reading through the blog post after post. Despite some very obvious opinions here and there the blog certainly is centered on the day-to-day proceedings of the author and I really didn’t come across anything that made me want to skip past a section.
The design is fantastic, a nice cream background with neat fonts, headings and subsections make for easy and pleasurable reading. Navigation wise I can’t complain, everything’s there for you to click and browse, all the links worked correctly, and yes, I was quite impressed. The blog does lack graphics, which is fine because I don’t believe blogs should be about graphics, and it also means more entries can be posted before being archived (there was 20 long entries). Perhaps this could be cut down though I don’t think this would be a problem for most people. The only annoying feature was the lack of an index for the archive posts, it was a case of next 20 or previous 20, and you couldn’t jump to say a specific month or period. Again, hardly anything that most people would be too fussed about.
Extra site features like articles etc ensured there was plenty to see around the site. I got wrapped reading one article written about ‘Teen pop stars and culture’ which I found most stimulating to read. Such controlled and intellectual writing in personal sites are few and fair between, but I do like to have the option.
Overall I was pretty impressed, in fact I’d go as far as to say this was the most enjoyable weblog I’ve reviewed of the 10 or so I’ve have done before. I give Adversity a big 4.5 out of 5, which ok, sounds a little high but I think if you check it out you’ll be inclined to agree with me. Two thumbs up and I highly recommend Adversity as your next stop after reading this.
Adversity