Balikbayan Box… There is something I have never heard of before. What is this type of box? Is it something important? Does it have meaning? Or is it just a name? All questions I had before I read this blog.
Thankfully there was a nice little piece on what a Balikbayan Box is. See to send things to the Philippines you either A) have to have a lot of money, or B) use a third party shipping company to get the present to the right person. And a Balikbayan Box is one from one of these third party companies that ship stuff. I hope I got this right as it wasn’t made very clear on the blog itself.
With this knowledge in hand, I had a good idea of what this blog was supposed to be about; sharing ideas, thoughts, and daily life with others. And the name of it is somewhat symbolic as to how it is delivered.
Getting through the archives was a chore. The blogging tool is using the good old calendar method to go to specific days worth of posts. The tool makes up for it by having a previous and next link at the bottom of all the pages to go backwards through the archives. The other problem with the blogging tool from what I can tell requires that you use their hosting. A lot of times I had problems loading the page and I also had a hard time loading the blogging tool’s page.
The blog itself is just average. There are a way too many “Monday Madness”, “Friday Five” and those sort of posts. While those are good for filler pieces, using them as a majority of the blog is not. The spots that do not have a predetermined format (question and answer) are where the true gems lay. Talking about what is going on in the daily life is very important.
The design of the blog is very out of control. For starters there is a background image that tiles (as it should with HTML) but is somewhat annoying when I have my screen set at a higher resolution. The colors of the blog are to match certain colors in the picture and at times I had a hard time reading the text on the background color. There is a script that creates these flying pixels around the mouse which was turned into crosshairs instead of the pointer. This was really annoying as I had a hard time figuring out what were links. Finally the author has disabled right click and copying of the text. This was bad considering there was so much going on with css and javascript tricks that some of the posts would not load properly unless I refreshed the page (or read the source).
Unfortunately there are no extras on this blog. There are a lot of off site links, and a small section about the title and about the author. I really wish the about section was expanded more to learn more about the author.
Over all this weblog has a lot of potential. Get a much cleaner design to make it easier to read. Get rid of all the javascript tricks to make the weblog less busy. Finally I would get rid of all the filler posts and post only the normal posts. I hope that the author of this blog will look at my opinions in here, and apply even some of them to the weblog. Just changing one of the things I recommend will vastly improve the weblog. After the author makes some changes, I encourage them to resubmit there site so we can see how much the blog has grown.
Balikbayan Box