Lionel Set Loose is a three table Blogspot template site. It’s white with black type. Sure it’s easy to read because there’s no color, but it’s boring. And when I arrive at a site that looks boring, I’m not particularly excited to read it. I did find an explanation on one of the side bars about this – apparently it’s some sort of bug, but it’s fixable if you click the link to skin the site. Unfortunately, in trying to skin the site I encountered an annoying plethora of pop up ads and it’s not immediately obvious that I skinned the site at all. Instead it looks like I was thrown into an older version of the blog at a different location. Finally I figured it out and went back to the original URL. Reading a blog should not be this much work.
Lionel, an engineering student in Kuala Lumpur, is the writer of Lionel Set Loose. Lionel writes about his day-to-day in a really engaging way. I was on the floor laughing about Lionel going on a raid of the just emptied dorms for leftover booty, and Lionel’s entry about going to the dentist had me squirming. And can I just say how hilarious his entry about the American tourists was? What I’m trying to say is that I like Lionel’s writing. It’s interesting, has good flow, and his grammar and spelling are generally pretty good.
I’ll be honest: I like the purple colors of the design in the skinned site. But I hate the red used to outline the boxes and for the headlines, and the dark purple used for the text can get a little hard to read after a while. The thing with the site skins needs to be fixed – halfway through my blog reading the skin reset itself back to white and black and I had to go through the hassle of re-skinning the site. The only other thing I noticed is that archives only go back to September, but October through the present are all on his current blog index.
Lionel keeps a log of the changes made to his site, and also has an About Me page, a little Idiot’s Guide to Lionel Set Loose type of page, links page, and a guestbook. It might be a nice idea to install commenting for each entry, as some of the entries could generate a lot of discussion.
Skinning errors aside, Lionel Set Loose is an interesting blog. I would definitely go back for another read.