When I first loaded WMBR in my browser, I took one look and then closed the tab, running away to sit in a corner muttering to myself. I was going to lambast this site, and perhaps I still will (yes, I will, I’ve decided).
Not since the latest Microsoft redesign have I seen a site less happy to operate in Netscape Navigator than this one. Flashing text, a tiny font, whole passages that suddenly underline when the mouse passes over them. Ugh.
Fortunately for the writer of this peculiar little site, I’m willing to cross the border every now and then; loading the site in IE I was suddenly presented with an entirely different picture: a well-designed, attractively minimalist site that doesn’t hate me.
I started with the “About” section – surely the best jumping-off point for any new reader – where I discovered many little things about the writer that I can truly relate to. This material reads like a bullet-pointed Seinfeld summary; “I never write the word ‘I’ with a lower case letter” (ironic when you visit the contact page), and “I broke up with a girlfriend once because she didn’t care to differentiate between ‘they’re’ and ‘their'” are two shining examples of the writer’s great sense of written presentation.
In the most recent entry (August 29th when I wrote this review), the writer laments his recent lack of interest in the site, with language much more colourful and involving than a simple, “I’ve been busy lately – sorry.” WMBR is a personal weblog, full of snappy, short entries, cross-postings, neatly laid out with lots of white space and a thin column structure that draws the eye down the length of the page. When you start reading you will find yourself strangely compelled to continue.
There’s too much content here to get through in one go. Instead I recommend dipping in and out; follow some of the supremely well measured external links, though always be sure to return. The posts here are bitesize, never too long and rarely too short, so you’ll never fall foul of the infamous blog fatigue, from which I have personally suffered on one or two other sites (my own included, shamefully).
Now, if only he could somehow transpose this delicate design into something that Netscape and its band of Mozilla brothers could digest…