Review 870

When I first reviewed “Living In A Bubble” (which is now Somewhere Close To No Where), I was very unimpressed when I first arrived at the site. The loading seemed ‘clunky’, you needed macromedia flash, and it took forever to load. Not so with the new edition. Gone are the bells and whistles, and broken links (there were only a couple before). What you see now is a super sleek, sharp looking site.



The weblog is updated much more frequently than it was before and the posts are well written. The author treats his blog as true journal, not a bunch of random remarks with quizz results. After you’ve read a few posts you really want to read more, its kind of addictive. I noticed the author is pretty much a positive attitude person, which certainly is rare in the blog world, and kind of refreshing.



I loved the new site design, easy to navigate, no broken links, loaded quickly in netscape and internet explorer.



There’s a really good bio section (I think some type of bio or faq is absolutley nessicary). The archives worked, in the last review they worked randomly and took forever to load, gone are those problems. There’s message board and a picture page (which is always a cool bonus in a site). I encountered nary a pop up as well.



I’m giving Somewhere Close To No Where a 4.5 because every single thing that was wrong with it before was fixed, redesigned, redone, and made better. How rare is that? I usually keep track of all the blogs I review and I have to say, when this one was redone I was very impressed. Four and a half stars, check it out.



Old review below


First impressions are everything when it comes to webpages, and with ‘Living In A Bubble’ I had what I would call an ‘okay’ one. I do not recommend going to this site if you use the Netscape browser, this is definatly best viewed through I.E., and you must have Macromedia Flash Player 5 installed on your computer to get the ‘full effect’.



Upon first loading this site I was impressed, you can tell immediatly that the author (even though he is humble about it) knows a few things about html.



I was happy to see pictures of the author immediatly when visiting the site and a ‘bio’ section which was very informative. I felt like I knew the author after just a couple ‘clicks’. I have to say though, that I was disappointed with a few things. First, when I visited the site I was hit with a huge pop up add, and the site took quite a long time to load through dial up and cable (I visited through both). There is an archive section but there is not a lot to it (some weeks only have a few entries) and they too, took some time to load and had a huge ‘pop up’ ad. I consider archives very important, when you visit the archives, you are visiting the ‘site history’. Some of the links in the ‘content’ menu I was unable to visit, using both I.E. and Netscape (I recieved errors on seven of eight visits). I did however enjoy the poetry I read, and I wish there were more. I also liked the enthusiasm in which the author wrote most of his posts.



I give ‘Living In A Bubble’ a 2.5 because after reading the ‘about’ section I really didn’t learn much more about the author through his posts, there weren’t many posts considering how long ago the site was started, and I just never felt like I made a ‘connection’ to the author. I do look forward to re-reviewing this site in the future, hopefully when I do review ‘Living In A Bubble’ again it will not take so long to load, and there will be more substantive posts. Living In A Bubble