Since the name Valley of the Shadow doesn’t give me much info, I looked at the url for some advice. This is a blogspot blog which isn’t always a bad thing, but it also doesn’t help matters. I went to this site open minded, not sure what to find.
The first thing I noticed was that it was a slightly modified blogspot template. It has an original banner at the top which is nice, and the entire background is blue with white text. So while it isn’t great, it is definately not bad either. The phrase in the banner says “A blog about Local and National Politics, news, culture and Vignettes from the Valley of the Shadow” so that is what I expect to read.
The blog is definately a political blog. The author Joey calls himself an institutionalist. He even defines it as:
Institutionalist:(N) Someone who respects the institutions of Government and Social protocols.
Even though he is an institutionalist he is more of a republican than a democrat.
The posts all talk about our government and what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. I don’t agree with his point of view, but I do respect it as he presents his opinions very well. All the posts are well written and easy to read. Most of his posts have a bit of a personal flair to them that makes reading them enjoyable instead of being drab.
One of the things that stuck out to me with this blog was the huge amount of links in the 2nd column. In fact this column is huge, that it requires 16 page downs to get to the end of it. Thankfully the author is smart enough to ensure that there are enough posts on the page to not have a bunch of white space. I am not sure what all of those links are for, but it is rather large.
In addition to the links there are a large number of advertisements in the column which don’t really seem to fit in at all. Finally the one thing that drove me crazy was that between the post’s title and the body there was a blurb for donations. While this was fine the first couple of times I read it, I found it very distracting by about the 30th post onward.
Overall I enjoyed this site. While it is still early for election stuff only in the primaries, there is a lot of good information to be had. When it gets closer to the main election I am sure this site is going to be a great one to read.NULL