Manictastic is a creative writing/short story blog. It is a prime example of a well written blog that isn’t in the traditional chronological style. The blogger could even remove the timestamps and most people who visit it probably wouldn’t even know it’s a blog - the content is that timeless.
The first little comment I have is why yellow? Sure, most of the text contrasts with the background pretty well (except for the timestamps and menu links), but why yellow? I suppose it makes Manictastic’s design pretty unique… but still… yellow?
One little thing that is definitely missing is categories. Right now there’s no obvious organization of the posts, and when you think about it short stories could be fairly easily categorized into drama, mystery, horror, etc. Categories… or in Blogger’s case - labels, would be perfectly suited for the job and it would make the blog 500% easier to navigate through.
Another missing item is some sort of subscription menu or button. It has an e-mail subscription field, but currently it doesn’t have any sort of RSS button. I also noticed it doesn’t use FeedBurner (or any similar service). While that doesn’t affect anything from the user’s perspective - it is always nice being able to see how many people are subscribed. As an added bonus, Blogger has a builtin feed redirection feature so you can easily set up FeedBurner.
I honestly have no clue what “Manictastic” means either. Perhaps that is one of the burning questions I should have asked the blog’s owner before doing this review. Oh well.
Rating
My overall rating for Manictastic is:
Content: - 9/10 - It’s very readable and it’s very engaging. That’s saying a lot coming from me… I tend to hate reading. The only real issues I found are some of the endings seem a bit rushed and it needs categories…
Design: 7/10 - Needs categories… and I’m a bit curious what the header graphic is all about. I’m also not a big fan of yellow…
Uniqueness: 9/10 - Since it is a blog about short stories I really can’t see any reason to not call it unique.
Overall 8/10 - It just needs categories and such. The actual blog content is perfectly fine though.
If you’re into creative writing - I’d highly recommend checking out Manictastic (feed).
Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:31 am
Thank you for your kind words, they made my day.
I have no idea why yellow either, I’ll change that with my next template update which will unfortunately by in late Januari because I only have enough time then.
The header is just some urban landscape because most of my stories are in an urban setting.
I’ll fix the feed and label thing today or tomorrow.
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:50 am
Ah OK, I get the header now. Look forward to seeing the changes