Review 2407

I wasn’t sure, since this was listed under entertainment, but I thought it might be about Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of Whatever, but it’s actually by/about a guy named Wes Ferguson. Oh.

This is a plain Diaryland template, black background with white lettering, not much visual appeal. This is what he says about it himself: “Well now that I have the new page up, I don’t know what to write about, haha…Clean layout but boring! Hm, yah. Not good.”

I tend to agree. Diaryland’s beginning to irritate me, anyway. I’m pretty sure their original intent was to have a huge, active community of bloggers and make piles of money, which maybe they do, but unless you’re in on the way Diaryland works, you could be missing some good stuff on people’s blogs. These days people are wanting to “get out more,” publicize their work and attract more readers outside their online communities. What I’ve seen on Diaryland blogs makes visitors work too hard to get to the extras and that could discourage people from coming back. I did eventually find the webrings he belongs to and the author’s favorite blogs, and to me these are important in helping to figure out where a blog author’s coming from.

Most of the links here at fergie.diaryland.com link back to other blogs, also by the same guy. The home page also links around to the same blogs, etc. He’s got t-shirts with his name on them, too, by the way. After some hunting around I found the “About” section, which lets us in on the fact he’s written and developed website content, and also has a sex and relationship column for gay men I couldn’t locate at the link given.

What he’s got is a lot of diffused attention going on here. I’m not sure what he wants to accomplish with his little empire of blogs and websites. Now, presumably, since he’s a writer he’s probably using it to promote his work in some way. Unless, that is, he’s one of those writers who believes promotion is beneath him; or (yes, I’ve actually seen this happen) thinks everybody should magically already know about him anyway. Most often what happens with writers is that they just need the light to come on and recognize what they need to do themselves to advance their careers.

He’s often a darned good writer, from what I’ve seen in the entries for this blog — my favorite was the entry on the lost sock orgy. He’s got some interesting ideas on gay rights and other things that perhaps deserve a bigger audience. I just wish there was some more focus. fergie