Life On The Road is a collaborative news blog about the trucking industry. I must say one thing before we get into the review - I am incredibly happy they let you know they are sponsored by the International Trucks corporation. It seems like nowadays a lot of bloggers are trying to hide the fact they have a business relationship with some corporation - so it was surprising to see them let you know about it up front. Despite the fact they are sponsored - all blog content and design decisions are made by the bloggers and not the company.

In addition to covering truck news - it also contains the occasional post about NASCAR and even some about politics and health - for example a post about a NBC report on truck drivers possibly cheating drug tests. Heck, there’s even a podcast.

There’s really only a few little negative comments I have. For starters the auto-discovery code for the feed doesn’t point to the FeedBurner feed, and occasionally there’s really long paragraphs. I know the paragraph thing would be a bit hard to fix though - seeing as how there’s multiple authors. The search field is also in a bit of a weird spot.

Other than that there’s not much I can say - the content is well written, the design is good, it is easy to navigate, the subscription info is in a good spot, everything is categorized well, they let you know about the business relationship with International Trucks, and it even has a podcast.

Rating

My rating for Life On The Road is:

Content: 9/10 - Very well done - keep up the excellent work!
Design: 8/10 - Just fix that feed problem and maybe move the search field/login link someplace else. Good use of images and good post formatting.
Uniqueness: 9/10 - Very niche subject - I really didn’t think anyone blogged about trucks before I saw this blog.
Overall: 9/10 - Good job.

If you’re into trucks you can check out Life On The Road here (feed)

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).

News Direct is a humorous news blog dedicated to bringing you the best (and most “honest”) news from across the world. As soon as I visited a few things caught my eye:

The first thing was several of the images were hotlinked from different sources. Might wanna be careful with that - hotlinking is considered copyright infringement and it can result in deletion of a blogger blog. I doubt there’s anything malicious going on - just a simple misconception of the copyright laws. When in doubt - ask the site owner if you can use the image. Even if you do get permission to use an image - you’re much better off putting it on your own blog so there is less of a risk of having someone’s server make your blog load slowly.

The second thing is, just like the other blogspot blogs I reviewed, the RSS auto-discovery code doesn’t point to the FeedBurner feed. To switch that over just replace these two lines in the theme:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="News Direct - Atom" href="http://newsdirect-aningeniousname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="News Direct - RSS" href="http://newsdirect-aningeniousname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />

With this code:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="News Direct - RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/NewsDirect" />

The other thing I noticed is the interviews are a bit hard to follow. Maybe bolding the labels before each line would make them easier to follow?

My last little issue with it is the homepage is quite long. In fact, it’s about 160KB long. While that isn’t a problem for those of us with 10 megabit connections - there’s still quite a few people running slower connections.

Oh, and you might also wanna get rid of some of the “interesting” links on the bottom - they basically kill the blog.

Rating

My overall rating for News Direct is:

Content: 4/10 - The “interesting” links on the bottom and the long page are big turn offs.
Design: 7/10 - Nice and simple - Just bold more stuff and fix the RSS auto-discovery. Maybe even space text out a bit more. It also needs a regular search field on the sidebar.
Uniqueness: 8/10 - It’s unique - what else can I say?
Overall: 5/10 - It’s a bit funny, but the NSFW link and image on the bottom are major turn offs for me.

You can visit News Direct here, and subscribe to it here.

Moviecat has got to be the strangest blog in this batch of reviews. It is really more of a photo blog than a regular blog - since it is pretty much just movie posters that have had the people’s heads replaced with cat heads. Some of them look really good though.

The first real issue I noticed is there is no feed auto-discovery for the blog, and the subscription info is stuffed on the bottom of the sidebar. There’s also a bit too many RSS buttons, 99% of the readers these days can do pretty much every RSS and atom version, I’d stick with one RSS 2 feed. It also looks like the blog uses the default name for the feed, since according to it the blog is called “Joomla! powered Site”.

It also doesn’t look like the review section is tied in very well with the blog. If there’s some way to do it (I’m not familiar with Joomla at all), a link from within each post to the reviews of the movies would be pretty nifty. Maybe even toss a review in underneath each image?

Other than those few things I think the blog is pretty good, and it serves its apparent purpose pretty well. Giving little extra things like e-cards and allowing user submitted content is also a big plus.

Rating

My overall rating for Moviecat is:

Content: 8/10 - Gave me a good chuckle - and the images are well made. It could use a bit more text on each post though.
Design: 8/10 - Laid out nicely - nothing is too distracting. Good job.
Uniqueness: 10/10 - I’ve never seen anything like this… ever. It’s definitely one of a kind
Overall: 9/10 - When I first visited I was hooked. It’ll definitely be a good blog to check out every once in a while for a good laugh.

You can visit Moviecat here, and you can subscribe here. I’m not really sure what else I can say - you really just have to visit it to see what it’s all about.

Nature/Environmentalist blogs were the most common blog submitted for a review - so it was a bit difficult to figure out which one to review (I tried to stick to one blog per topic… at least for this batch). In the end I chose to review Nature Delight, a blog about everything plants, animals, and nature in general. Most of the posts have extremely detailed writeups - but occasionally a post is put up for something called Wordless Wednesday and it is pretty much just a cool image with a quick writeup. I actually never heard of Wordless Wednesday before visiting Nature Delight - it’s proof that you learn something new every day.

The first thing I noticed is there are a lot of widgets and adsense blocks - way too many. I also noticed the feed subscription stuff was pretty hard to find (it’s kinda stuffed in the middle of the sidebar). While the content and pictures are laid out very well - the sidebar and header areas seem a bit too busy. Try separating the Adsense out as well - having them stuffed together doesn’t increase the CTR at all (if anything it hurts it). As with the other blogs I’ve reviewed - the feed for the auto-discovery code doesn’t point to the FeedBurner feed you’ve set up.

As far as the content goes - I’m not really into plants and animals that much - but I do love the pictures. The picture of that strange jellyfish is pretty amazing - is it real or fake? And is it just me, or does it look like Giraffes could be knocked over by a slight gust of wind? I mean look at the things… big body… small head… and skinny legs. Looks like a slight breeze would make it stumble around.

Anyway, back on topic, the biggest issue I could see is there are too many widgets - and the subscription info was fairly impossible to find. Probably the second biggest issue is that the posts with long writeups don’t seem to have much personality. When I read it I can’t really tell much about the blogger other than they love nature and know a lot about plants and animals.

Other than that is is laid out extremely well, and the images really make the posts looks unique. The content is well written and extremely detailed, and this is a blog I’ll probably revisit in the future.

Rating

My overall rating for Nature Delight is:

Content: 8/10 - Well written and very detailed - but it needs a bit of personality to spice things up.
Design: 6/10 - Lots of widgets and adsense, and the feed stuff was hard to find. Good job formatting the posts though.
Uniqueness: 8/10 - I haven’t seen other blogs like this - but I think it could still use a bit of personality to spice it up a bit.
Overall: 8/10 - For being only a month old it is definitely on the right track. Keep up the good work.

You can visit Nature Delight here, and you can subscribe to it here.