The B-Zone “world of bits, bytes, birds, bollocks and booze” belongs to Bjoern, and if ever a blog lived up to its tagline this would be the it. The reader is immediately presented with a colourful striped design principally in blue, beige, and white . I’m not sure whether it is intentional but it has a very retro feel about it, and against all my expectations I found it actually worked well with the content here.
A brief introduction to the author resides here, providing details about likes, dislikes and occupation in list format. What stands out for me is his hobbies, listed as “everything creative – writing, fine arts, photography, music; coding; dressing up & going out” – you’ll quickly learn that a lot of what you find on this site are arranged around these items. There is in fact a lot to this site, blog aside there’s freeware for downloading, exceptional artwork, and music. There is a section entitled coding, which unfortunately was offline the three or four times I visited this site for writing this review.
The weblog part of this site was added to an existing site in July 2003 for the express purposes of highlighting software releases and writing the odd titbit about his everyday life, and that is ultimately what you find on these pages. There’s a lot to see, and a whole range of subjects covered – obviously programming and computers is a central theme so I expect this site to appeal to fellow geeks such as myself. Bjoern writes well, short concise entries quickly becoming longer and more detailed as the blog ages. Not everything held my attention, but on the whole I did enjoy what I found here, especially the references to his programming endeavours. That is once I managed to drag
myself away from Solitairy Bjoern, which was strangely addictive.
The design as I said is based upon a vertical striped background. The colours work well together and despite my initial beliefs was not at all hard on the eye. It suit’s the content, and I believe the personality of its owner very well. The site is easy to navigate, with the added touch of a ‘top’ link on every post – a small detail but actually very helpful in navigating this site. All in all the design worked, there were no serious navigational issues and the only real draw back for me was the unfinished areas – there is nothing so frustrating for a visitor than finding an potentially interesting area of a site, only to discover “Content will be back within a few hours, please check later” especially when it happened to be significantly longer than a few hours – each occasion I visited over the span of a few days it was offline. It’s not really good design practice – if a section isn’t finished or is under construction don’t upload it until such time that it is finished.
There is a lot of see at the B-Zone. First impressions of the tagline led me to believe that the content of this site would be a little ‘laddie’ but this was not the case. Well written entries covering IT and everyday events, excellent examples of freeware for download, and really exceptional artwork all make this site a worthwhile viewing experience. Completion of the unfinished areas and this is definitely one of the better personal weblogs.The B-Zone