Review 2395

I had no idea what to expect going in to my first review. The title gave me a tiny bit of apprehension — was this going to be one of those that go on and on about the author’s extreme self-involvement like that is something new? Or maybe it was more on the order of a charming, but small, joke. I hoped for the latter, but you never know…

She does post daily, since 2001, and seems to have developed a following, since most of her posts have several comments in response. Since the first thing one sees today is a post containing two pictures (maybe the same woman?) of an overweight, middle-aged lady and a bodybuilder, and the second post concerned menopause, I got the mistaken impression this was the author. Earlier posts suggest someone much younger.

Problem is, she shoots herself in the foot with the profile, which says, “this is a site about regular stuff, I’m a regular person…” Unfortunately this gives no insight into who this person might be, or why potential readers would be interested. Early posts are just fragments of observation on events in her life, with not really enough information on just what happened to set her off ;>) Later on this improves, but most of the posts are still depressingly “regular.” It’s almost like the author really doesn’t want her readers to get too close. Still, this is a typical newbie mistake. People without much writing experience tend to presume a lot about their readers, thinking that some things should be obvious to the reader when they’re not. It’s only after writing for a while that newbies recognize you can’t make your readers work to understand what you’re saying.

Technically this site isn’t one I’d personally visit too often, as it takes a long time to load on my 56k modem. Perhaps this is at least partially the result of the graphics up top, which I didn’t see until after I gave up waiting for the start page and started reading through the posts. It’s been constructed using a template, which gives the site an unobjectionable, but bland appearance, and none of the links in the links section work as they should. They either send you to dead sites, or sites with so many pop-ups you lose track of what the original link was supposed to be. It’s got both guest book and guest map. There are a lot of bells and whistles here that don’t contribute to the overall quality of the site. She has joined a lot of webrings and seems to have done a lot of online promo for her site, offering many chances to vote for her in one place or another. But this set of “Extras” has its own confusions, so I didn’t go too far into those.

If she could clear up some of the confusion as to who she is and why she’s chosen this venue, and possibly give a new or casual visitor something more to go on, the writing does show some promise, which is why I’ve rated it the way I did. Otherwise, this site is destined to stay firmly among the “legions of unknown bloggers.”Trinity Sixty-Three – The Escapades of me