Footsteps in the Mirror. Not quiet sure what to make of this title. Obviously something about self reflection, but what I am not sure. The name didn’t really strike me as something fantastic, though it is original for blogs. Lets see what awaits inside.
The page loads to an impressive design. A nice rounded corners rectangle thing with the main content inside along with a second column of other goodies. The logo at the top says “The Recorded Reflections of a Redefined Reality” so my assumption about self reflection is probably right. The design struck me as something cool and different at first, but that slowly faded away as I read. The problem is the main content is in a div with scroll bars in the center of this great design. And this does not perform as it should in my browser of choice – Safari. I like to be able to hit the spacebar, the page down button, or the down arrow to scroll. None of these options worked which meant I had to click on the scroll bar to get it to scroll. This just became annoying since I had to take time to think about my mouse position and the scrolling rather than being able to read the blog. Think of it as you are reading an article in a magazine, and at the bottom of the page it says continued on page 43. Now that isn’t so bad, but imagine, if on page 43 it said article is on page 23 and on page 23 it says the article is on page 31. You get the idea. It complicated things.
Now the blog itself is lengthy. This is one of the few blogs in recent history that actually has archives dating back to 2003. Not to mention that this author loves to write. Each post is a long and lengthy post. He typically posts about his daily life, what he is feeling, problems, good times, the standard stuff. It is clearly there for him to look back and and reflect upon. It reads like this instead of something for the readers. I didn’t get that feeling of “I am taking a peek at his life”, instead I got the feeling of “I am trespassing while taking a peek at his life”. This was hard to get around, but I managed.
I managed because the author loves to write. And while I would say that more posts have this feeling, some do not. It is these posts that I enjoyed reading. The posts where I felt like I was invited to the party. My favorite post out of all his posts was A Word To All Bloggers. He really captures what I believe is both true and wrong with blogging. Even if you ignore his site, I recommend this post as a read.
Overall I had a hard time getting into this site. As I said, I felt like I wasn’t invited and that just made it boring to me. When I found those posts that seemed open I enjoyed it. The author clearly can write and loves to do it. He is well read and it shows. I am curious if I would have had a more enjoyable time had the design not gotten in the way of me wanting to just read the blog. This site would score higher by me if the design was more free flowing and if the author focused on the posts which are the most open.Footsteps in the Mirror