There are many types of blogs on the Internet, but the two most common, at least from what I have noticed, are blogs that provide money making tips and personal blogs. The money making type blogs usually provide the same posts as other blogs, and don’t really have much of anything new to say. The personal blogs, on the other hand, contain posts on anything and everything in the life of the author. This can lead to some very entertaining posts.
This week’s review is a personal blog from an individual in South Africa, and like most personal blogs this one tends to lost its focus at times.
Web Site: iMod – Thought Promotion
Description: The ramblings of a 25 year old, eMarketing developer, cigarette smoking guy who is a complete Internet junkie.
Design 
The design of iMod is very simple with the content on the left and two navigation sidebars on the right. The top of the two sidebars consists of RSS subscription, an about the author box, sponsors and ads and boxes of links such as popular and latest posts. Futher down the sidebar are the navigational links.
The header takes up a large portion of the top part of the site, and starts further down the page because of a rather large margin at the top. The header may be large but the author has included some nice and easy to read links on the right side of the header. The white font colour stands out nicely against the blue background.
As with many blogs, the font size chosen for iMod is rather small and some visitors may have trouble reading the pages. In the navigational sidebars, the font size is also small but the colour chosen makes it even harder to read. I can easily read the small font, but reading the sidebar is more difficult as the font colour doesn’t contrast well with the blue background.
There is a small footer on each page that is almost impossible to fully read because of the light font colour. The text in the footer indicates the blog engine, host and subscription links (both entries and comments).
Although the design is nice and clean, the font size and colours chosen can make it hard for some visitors to read. Losing the top margin, or decreasing it, will allow more content to appear above the fold.
Focus 
One of the many traits of a personal blog is the lack of focus. Authors of such blogs tend to write about what they feel like at the particular time the post is published. This is no different with iMod.
For the most part, the author tends to focus on technology and the Internet. As you have read in the description, the author is an Internet junkie. There are many technology posts, with everything from Microsoft, Google, and the Internet discussed in various posts. Information about other Web sites is also provided in various posts.
The author then loses this technology focus when writing about videos on YouTube and pictures of celebrities. This is one of the downsides to this genre of blogs – lack of focus. The flipside to this is that author’s of personal blogs aren’t restrained by a niche, and can freely write about anything.
Content
As previous stated in the focus, the content of iMod is mostly on technology, but there are a few non-technical posts as well.
Some of the blog posts contain only text, which is a rarity in the blog world. Some posts do contain images that are appropriate for the post, and the author even includes posts about videos, which include the actual video from YouTube.
The content is not too long, which is a nice read as the author gets to the point. The posts also aren’t too short to the point where some important detail is missing. The writing style tends to be more personal as if the author is talking directly to a visitor on the blog.
Since the author appears to be from South Africa, much of the content is geared towards visitors from South Africa. A good example is the advertising costs. Many bloggers would indicate the ad costs in US dollars, but in this case the ad costs are listed in South African Rand (I had to look that one up).
I found the content overall to be easy to read and enjoyable. I liked the length of the posts as they weren’t too long or too short.
Spelling and Grammar
Although I didn’t find too many spelling and grammar mistakes, some did exist. The errors that I did find didn’t reduce the readability of any of the posts. I did, however, have trouble reading a few posts because of long run-on sentences. Although neither the spelling or run-on sentences prevented me from understanding what the author was trying to say in each post.
Overall
iMod overall is a good South African blog with some nice technical content. For those that don’t enjoy reading technical posts, there are also non-technical but informational posts as well. The size of the font, and some of the font colour chosen, mainly in the sidebars and footer, can make it harder for some to read.
The posts are well-written with a few spelling mistakes and run-on sentences, which don’t detract from the readability of any of the posts. Overall, iMod is a good blog to visit.
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