Blog Name: scribkin [link]
Blog Author: J. Phil
Blog Tagline: where code and culture converge
First post: March 19th 2008
Status: Active posting with an average so far of 16 posts per month
RSS Feed: full text
A bit about scribkin
A quick look at the blog’s About page (something every blog should have) helps give a quick explanation of what the blog name is suppose to mean
scrib - Latin for write, for example scribble, ascribe, scripture, conscript, proscribe, or describe.
kin - Old English for family, relatives. For example, next of kin.Together, the family bound by writing. scribkin.
While J. Phil has had a personal blog (no address given) for sometime he started scribkin as a news type blog to talk about social media along with other web technologies for the following reasons:
- To learn how to set up my own Wordpress blog and teach myself PHP and other technologies.
- To hone my skills as a blogger.
- To build a portfolio of work.
From a design point of view
My first impression of the blog when I first saw it was that it had a nice clean look to it although he fell into the same trap that I wrote about yesterday with a missing background color setting for the body tag; which you can see from the upper graphic of the site or here on a smaller section (enlarged)
Other than that the design of the blog was easy on the eyes, the font was at a legible size (especially for these tired old eyes) and the posts were nicely separated.
The only problem I had really was with his sidebar. I feel that there isn’t enough defined separation between each of the items (widgets) in the sidebar. I also would have liked to see the titles for each item being a font size or two bigger than the content of the widget. While it blended in well with the overall design of the blog sometimes this can be a detriment in that people don’t end up actually seeing the content of the sidebar so I would suggest finding some way to make it or the items in it stand out a little bit more.
The one last thing which I noticed just as I was getting ready to post this review was that there needs to be a space added between the View Comments and the number of comments available. I know it’s a little thing but it still caught my eye so I figured I would mention it.
From the content side of things
J. Phil bills the blog as a being a news site for social media, social bookmarking and other web technologies. As I browsed through his posts I could see that he is keeping pretty close to that philosophy and with it being a growing segment of the web I don’t think he’ll have much of a problem sticking with it.
One thing that I did notice is that if it is a subject that he is very interested in he can get quite detailed with his information. If there is anyone I know of who could give the chart and number crunching king Louis Gray a run for his money I would say it has to be J. Phil. His post on his stats breakdown is a good example of this but also his post on RSSmeme and FriendFeed show as well that he can write a really good review of a service with plenty of details.
There is something that he is doing that I haven’t seen before and that is that he has made use of the Odiogo service to provide text to voice for each post. You can access the voice version of the post by clicking on the listen now button under the date of the post. When you click on a small MP3 web player will be displayed for you start listening to the post. You can also download that MP3 version as well which is a bonus. A very nice touch and something that I might have to take a look at myself.
Additionally I like the fact that he has made good use of graphics in each of his posts. Whether they be graphics specific to the site or service he is posting about or just ones that help liven up the post it is good to see as it makes for a better reading experience in my opinion.
Overall Opinion
I like scribkin and look forward to J. Phil’s posts showing up in my feed reader as he writes in a clear and friendly style that makes reading his posts enjoyable. I hope he continues to blog as I think his thoughts and opinions about social media are level and well balanced; which is something we really need in this area.
While he may not blog every day I think you can be assured that when he does post something it will be well worth reading.
FriendFeed Likes Compatibility Chart
This chart is courtesy of Felix over at #comments who put together the code to let people find out who they are compatible to on FriendFeed based on post ‘Likes’. I include this partly to let you see who else likes scribkin as well as for a bit of fun.
Conversation Tags: blog review, blogs
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Go Phil! Go Phil!
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Also, I'm probably going to add Lijit search this weekend. Even though I haven't heard of any complaints about not having search, the site vote has been slightly in favor of search.
Thanks again! Totally flattered!
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Good work
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