I wondered into Spacemonk and was greeted by an orange, yellow and white blog, neatly presented in a format that I found easy to read. There’s nothing totally distinguishing about the blog on first glance, but its there, its in your face, and that’s pretty much what you’d expect these days.
The content of the blog is wide and broad and totally all over the place, it doesn’t focus just on one topic, one person or one idea, it’s a platter of assorted goodness bundled up quite nicely. Its common every day stuff that’s light to read and whilst you may not be interested in one section you’re sure likely to find a post that you will. Issues range from general news, the authors weight progress, to music festivals, it well and truly has it all and I found most, if not all posts, pleasurable to read.
One glaring omission is any information about the author (or that I could find). I had no background to work with and a little of the post could be rather confusing to those who have never been there before. The tagboard is a nice feature, but it makes the links section look rather cluttered and I think any opinions made by readers should be left in the comments section not the tagboard which a lot of the readers seem to be doing. A heaps of links to other blogs probably is a little over an overkill, there’s a lot and again it just adds to the clutter and probably should be sorted in either a smaller area or somewhere else entirely.
Design wise I can’t find too much wrong with it, a lack of colour is one thing I found rather taxing on the eyes over a period of time, but that’s just personal preference. It’s also interesting to note that headings are smaller then the normal text font, does make it hard to separate different posts and has a feel of one big long running post. All that said, its easy to read, nice font size, colours are simple and no overly taxing graphics either.
All up I give Spacemonk a 2.5 out of 5 and a single thumb up. It might not be the most glamorous blog out there but its certainly filled with some interesting reading that will keep most reading for a fair while.
spacemonk