I am sure regular reviewers here at TWR will be able to back me up on this, but sometimes there are reviews that we don’t want to write at all because we would much rather just keep reading the blog instead. I have been reading “SuperSteve for the last two hours (which has got me through the front page and a couple of the archives) and if it wasn’t for the fact that it is now gone midnight, I would much prefer to carry on reading and not bother with the review at all.
Anyway, write the review I must, so here is what I think of the site. I was a bit dubious at first when I entered the site. Don’t get me wrong, it looks great, is his own original design and has an overall “Superhero” theme. I had to get passed the introductory page first, which was reasonably impressive (had an animated gif amongst other things) though admittedly was a bit pointless. The blog itself included his own art work, streaming audio and each post had a cool little movie quote at the end. This guy could have got a five simply for having “The Littlest Hobo” theme tune available to play whilst reading! I couldn’t help feeling though that with all this work carried out on the theme, the appearance of the blog, there is no way the content was going to measure up. This guy was overcompensating with his design for the lack of anything interesting to say, I was sure.
However, I was wrong. This is a personal blog- the majority of the postings are about Steve and his life. There is not even an “About Me” page, let alone Photoblog, dedicated reviews section or other things which tend to attract a high score. So what makes this blog a 5, whereas others which do have these things have to make do with 3 or 3.5? Well firstly, there is no need for an “About Me” page, because his whole blog covers this. And who wants to see photos when the writing is so creative, funny, interesting, personal, honest and er… I am running out of adjectives here, but you get the idea. It’s a good read. And Steve has that great knack amongst a few bloggers of writing for the reader, not for himself. He is often back-tracking and making sure readers are “up to speed” with things, so you don’t ever feel like you need to read the entire archives to work out what the hell is going on now.
Now it is rather fortunate on Steve’s part that he does seem to have a great life – a new job (and even at the old job which he hated, everyone seemed to love him there), lovely girlfriend, loads of friends, interesting opinions but most importantly, a great way of conveying all this loveliness to the reader. (This abundance of affability might also explain why he has recently been averaging 14 comments per post, too). There is no pretentiousness or arrogance to be found, but simply some genuine gratitude and a love of and involvement in life. Even when he is feeling crappy he manages to write a letter to Santa about it.
I don’t know what else I can say really without you all getting bored about reading how much I enjoyed this blog. To summarise then, I thought the blog was accessible and life-affirming – it will also be added to “my fave blogs” list (which is actually harder to achieve than a 5 out of 5 – a rare accolade indeed!)SuperSteve.Org