August 18, 2007

It’s been quite some time since I’ve had the chance to write a review on another blog. Mostly I’ve been hit up for other types of sites, mainly businesses looking for linkage. That’s part of what Random Encounters of We is looking for I am sure, but they also asked for an honest review of the site itself, so here it is. I’ve been trying to decide for several days now what to write. With some of the stuff it’s real easy because I can just say “so and so has a product and it might be a good idea for you to look at” and feel OK because I never said I use it (unless I have) but with another blogger I want to give an honest review and maybe we both can learn something from it.

Bear in mind I know almost nothing about designing blog templates and it was like ripping teeth out of my head to come up with the design I am using and it was just adapted from a normal web site with tables and a bit of embellishment on my part. Not only that but my tastes seem to be a bit different so you have to take it with a grain of salt, but I hate the generic blogger templates, which is what it looks like they are using to me. I don’t like the bright green at all. It makes me want to rip my eyeballs out of my skull, but as I said, this is coming from a guy that has bright orange Halloween text on a black background. Opinions. We all heave ’em, er..have them.

The site has been around for about ten months and obviously judging from the page rank, has some return visitors and a few links to it. I read through about a month’s archives on the front end and on the back end to get a general idea about the blog and who ‘we’ are. They also participate in paid blogging, as I do. One of the things I noticed is what I will do a lot of times when I really don’t have a lot to say and am just trying to make a couple of bucks…

post

paid post

post

paid post.

Some of the most recent entries sound like they are just creating filler. Maybe it takes one to know one because I have days where I will post 20 or 30 entries and maybe one comes from the heart. I only had to go back a couple of pages in the archives though to find a recent entry that sounded like she knew what she was talking about and enjoyed writing it. It’s a post on finances and debt entitled ‘Past, Present and Future of Your Money‘. It was an enjoyable post and I felt like I could learn something reading more of this stuff.

One of the biggest ways to be successful as a blogger (as if I really know this stuff) is to write about what you know and know about what you write. You can always tell when I have enjoyed writing about something here, there is usually plenty of crassness and foul language and gnashing of teeth. Over at Random Encounters of We it’s about money and the family.

They also run a games blog called Random Games as well that you might be interested in checking out.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I like the blog, but I think I would develop more posts about things that make you go hmmm…and redo or have someone else redo the template. There are tons of blogger templates and plugins out there for free that I have seen.

Technorati : Blog Review, Random Encounters of We

I suppose there is something to be said for extreme sports but I am partial to trying to chug two beers at a time myself. That’s about as extreme as it gets.

Hopefully today won’t be a terribly long day. I have one of my managers off today and I am sure it will be busy but I have two pretty decent cooks and as long as they show up I should be able to get out of there in a timely manner. The good thing is that one of the two manager trainees is working and she is having to do her required second shifts which means that she will handle drawer change tonight and I won’t have to worry about that too much as long as everyone shows up.

I was pleased to see when I logged into one of the posting services that I use that I was given a bunch of extra assignments. They aren’t particularly long posts that I have to write, but I do have around 25 spread across three blogs. I will try and get most of them finished this evening. I should be able to do them in about two hours if I’m humping it.