I started from the very beginning of existence of “tangents” to find out what it was all about. Turns out, the weblog used to be hosted by some place called “teen open diary” before Stephanie (that’s our author) switched over to Blogger, which is where it’s hosted now.
No matter where I visited in the nearly year’s worth of archives, one thing remained the same – the audience Stephanie continues writing for is an audience that not only knows her online, but in person, too.
The only thing to this site is the weblog. There’s no information to fill you in on who you’re reading about unless you go through and read all of the archives, and even then, you’re still left with entirely too many unanswered questions to feel like you really know anything about the person you’re reading about. To me, I found that a bit disappointing.
The layout of the site is a plus. The format is very simple, and with the lack of any additional part of the site, it’s naturally easy to navigate. It features black text on a white background, with a bright pinkish color used for the hyperlinks scattered throughout. The site is very pleasing on the eye, and shows that sometimes less is, in fact, more.
The same can’t be said for the actual weblog, though. There’s no concept at all of the word “less”. Most posts are a good five or six paragraphs long, but are often shoved into one paragraph, with lots of “……” and random words in bold type every now and then.
The weblog was hard to actually get into. Stephanie would share a story that I could nearly relate to, and then follow it up with an entire conversation transcript from AOL or a recount of her day, which included too many personal tidbits for me to really grasp what she was talking about.
I’m sure those that know Stephanie or those that are involved in her life would love coming back to visit here. For the average weblog reader, who’s never met Stephanie and who never will, this type of writing is a tad hard to follow.