Playground Blues
Site: Playground Blues
Author: Nathan Paul Borror
Location: Springfield, Missouri USA (or somewhere near it)
What makes this Blog readable?
Originality is something that all of us strive for. At times, this can be very difficult, especially for the graphically challenge (me). However, Nathan manages to create a very original layout, while keeping his look consisting with the Blogging community. Very well done Nathan.
But this isn’t about being well-designed, it’s about being readable. Nathan doesn’t blog all that often, simply looking at his archives will tell you that since October 2003 he has posted less than 60 times. However, more often than not, his posts are personal, amusing and well thought out. Sometimes, it seems that, his journal becomes an “out loud thinking” blog. Meaning that he is just thinking out loud by typing out his posts. Some other bloggers do this as well, but they fall short, because they end up babbling. Most of Nathan’s blog posts are concise, to the point, and well categorized.
The rest of his site is very nice as well. It’s a personal site with all the trimmings: Resume, short Autobiography, Portfolio, Photo sets and a pretty large “Library” of resources, music, links etc. Again, this all seems well thought out, well categorized and displayed in a smart manner.
Definitely one to bookmark. You can add him to your Kinja digest, but don’t look for him on Blo.gs. It looks like he used to ping the Blo.gs server, but no longer does so. According to the About Playground Blues page, he hand coded his site in BBEdit. However, I found this strange since he is a Macintosh user, and his page is coded in ASP. I’ve never gotten BBEdit to do syntax coloring on ASP well, so perhaps an email to Nathan is in order. Well done Nathan, keep up the good work.
Added: Post-Review: It seems I am not the only one that likes Nathan’s blog. A few days after writing this review, Jefferey Zeldman wrote about his May 1st Reboot likes, and PlaygroundBlues was one of them.
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