Review: My Consoling Asylum

I have visited many blogs since I started Technically Easy, and have come across blogs of different genres. I have read travel, technical, photography and money-making blogs. The one type of blog that I do enjoy reading are the personal blogs, where individuals just talk about their life.

This week I look at a personal blog. The one thing about these types of blogs is that it allows the author to pretty much talk about anything they are interested in for that particular day.

Web Site: My Consoling Asylum

Description: The home of the half-sane, half-unwell. It’s where mundane everydayness rests. It’s just about everything…

Design 

The design of the blog uses the new standard of blog layout. The content is on the left, two sidebars on the right and a large footer that contains more information and links. I have always been used to the navigation on the left, but since I have started blogging I now don’t mind it on the right.

The one thing that stands out about the navigational sidebars is the difficulty in finding the navigation. The author has included much advertising in the sidebar, which seems to drown out the links to the blog. Moving the navigation to one column of the sidebar and the advertising to the other will help to clean up the sidebar.

As I mentioned the footer is large and contains more information and links about the blog. The blog roll is located in the footer, but can be hard to read since the links are blue, similar to the footer. Making the links a much lighter colour, such as white, will help make them more visible.

The author does provide white links in the horizontal menu bar at the top of the blog, which makes it easy to read. The posts are also easy to read as the font size chosen is a nice size.

The home page displays a few paragraphs from each post, and you need to click a link to view the rest. I don’t mind doing this, but I don’t like how a new window opens to view the rest of the post. The rest of the post should open in the same window.

A few tweaks to the blog design could make a good blog even better.

Focus 

Many personal blogs due lack some focus because the author’s tend to talk about everything under the sun. This blog is no exception.

I try to be fair when rating focus for personal blogs, but I did have trouble finding a focus for this blog. The author does talk about many different subjects, as can be seen from the categories list. I don’t mind the different topics, but perhaps the author can narrow down the scope a bit, and maybe author several blogs to spread out the topics a little.

Content 

I enjoyed reading some of the posts the author has written. The content is written in a very personal way, like the author is talking directly with you. This is a nice touch as it is a personal blog.

It is nice that the author only includes a few paragraphs of each post on the home page as some of the posts can get rather long. I did find the longer posts as interesting as the shorter posts.

The author publishes several posts a week, as can be seen from the dates of the current posts, as well as the 182 count beside last years archive number. It is always nice to see a blogger that takes the time to publish posts on a regular basis.

The content is perhaps the strongest aspect of My Consoling Asylum and the author has taken the time to keep the readers interested with regular posts.

Spelling and Grammar 

I noticed that there are a few grammar mistakes that caused me to re-read a few sentences to understand what the author was trying to say. In instances it looks as if the author tried to write a sentence one way, but changed the wording of the sentence part way through. This caused the sentence to not make sense unless you read it again.

Besides the few grammar mistakes, the posts overall were not difficult to read because of the spelling and grammar.

Overall 

My Consoling Asylum is a personal blog that talks about everything under the sun. Like many personal blogs, it is hard to find a specific focus to the blog. A few issues with the design that take away from easily navigating around the blog. The design issues, however, can easily be corrected by simply moving some of the blog’s widgets around.

I enjoyed reading through some of the published posts as the author does write posts on a more personal level. A few grammar mistakes to subtract from the overall readability of the blog, but overall this is a good blog to read.