Deathnoruk is not a word I was previously familiar with. I’m now convinced
that it’s completely made-up and unimportant, since it doesn’t translate
into a word in eight different languages. Despite that minor technicality, I proceeded
to deathnoruk.com and was quite pleased with what I was first presented with.
My first thought was, “It’s always great to see a blog that doesn’t
use a template”. The image at the top looks great and matches the rest
of the site’s blue color scheme. The interface appears wonderfully clean
at first glance. This blog is easy on the eyes.
After remarking to myself that the presentation was definitely better than
the average blog, my eyes wondered to down to the content in the first article.
In less than a second, I noticed glaring spelling and grammatical errors. Some
of the articles are actually difficult to read and entire paragraphs can ramble
on without being broken up into sentences.
Curious about the author, I browsed to the About Me page. All of Jamie’s
personal details – including likes and dislikes – are listed in point form.
This blogger is from the East Midlands, in the United Kingdom and has had a
blog for many months. Initially residing on GeoCities he later switched to ModBlog
and now maintains both http://deathrowuk.modblog.com
and http://deathrowuk.com.
Jamie writes articles that appear to be sincere and from the heart. It’s
great to see bloggers post exactly what’s on their mind without holding
back.
Looking closer at the design of the blog, I notice that the first page –
a spash screen – doesn’t have a title specified and displays the
standard “Untitled Document, oops! Attention to detail in this blog is
lacking; minor design issues and the spelling and grammatical errors are two
such examples.
This blog offers a huge number of interesting features, all of which are a
tribute to Jamie’s creativity. He allows users to register to create blogs
of their own, which are displayed on the site. There is absolutely no documentation
for this process, however, and it’s not completely clear what this feature
is capable of. I decided to be the first person to sign up for a blog, and I
was presented with this after clicking the submit button:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80004005’
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Field ‘publicblog_users.user_favfilm’
cannot be a zero-length string./simpleblogreg.asp, line 78
Oops! You’d better get that ironed out before offering
the feature to your readers.
There are a number of fully functioning features, however. Using inline frames,
there are many alternate layouts, including his blog presented from a mock iPod;
this blog is merely a rendition of one located at http://deathrowuk.modblog.com.
Did Jamie code all of this himself? He should take credit for that. If he didn’t,
then he should indicate that also.
I noticed that there were a few features on Jamie’s old modblog website
that he doesn’t have on his new one. The picture gallery, the calendar
browser and guestbook are just a few examples of absent features.
It seems that this blog is not yet complete. There are technical bugs, a couple
of missing features, and some desperately needed spellchecking. I’d suggest
that this blogger perfect what he already has before creating new features.
After writing this review, it has dawned on me that Deathrowuk can be separated
into Death-Row-United-Kingdom. Death Row has content that is only slightly more
interesting than what’s found on most personal blogs. Features are meant
only to compliment the content. Features are cool to check out and play around
with, but you can only do that once or twice. Without excellent content there
is little reason to bookmark this blog.