I had the sinking suspicion that I had visited this site at some point in time. Maybe it’s just because the word “precocious” is so popular for website titles/names. If I had visited in the past, I certainly don’t recognize it at all now. I would almost call it refreshing if I hadn’t already seen thousands of black & white no tables sites before.
The writing itself comes from the heart. She says what she thinks, feels, and believes. This is a Good Thing(tm). She allows us to see her life in its entirety: good and bad. She’s been to hell and back and still managed to keep her sense of humor. Like they say, “What doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger.” Aside from her personal life, she talks a little about web design/programming, role playing and a few other interests. Not much useless personality quiz/Friday Five type fluff here (also a Good Thing), she has more important things to say than that.
There were a lot of problems with her site design. The author goes through the effort of making her site XHTML validated, but does not check her CSS. Some of it appears to be proprietary of Internet Explorer, which was the only browser I had that could display the site properly. Because of this, some of her black journal text overlapped a dark background image in Opera, since it doesn’t support the proprietary code that makes background image transparent. I tried to load the site in Netscape 6.0, but all it did was crash miserably. Every. Single. Time. Netscape 4.76 handles the layout better than expected, except where the calendar and a few of the images appear right behind the journal text in some spots, making it difficult to read.
I enjoyed reading her entries and I recommend this site if you enjoy reading what’s on the inside of a real person. I found that the more I dug through her archives, the more I liked and respected her, despite the design/layout issues.