Reviews, Part II

I think that part of the appeal of creating and maintaining a blog is the ability to control peoples' impression of you. The appearance of a blog is the first clue anyone might have to its owner and their personality and tastes, and its content. Pull up Google and search for blog skins, and you'll get thousands of results. (http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/) The generic ones offered when you first set up the blog can easily be modified, as well. For instance, when I discovered that new elements could be added to my blog, I pulled up Photoshop and, for kicks and giggles, took ten minutes to slap together a header.

The principle is much the same on MySpace and Facebook, along with other social sites of their irritating ilk. Some people (who, for some reason which has yet to be figured out by the most talented scientists on six continents, want to be emo), can cloak their pages under a veneer of black and red, and maybe some stitches and black roses to show how jaded and scarred by life they are, slap a clip of Linkin Park on there, and pretend their lives suck. Conversely, and perhaps in a more dangerous sense, anyone, of any age, could make their MySpace look quite tame and appealing and really be some creepy 50-year-old guy in Virginia typing to fourteen-year-olds one-handed. (I have heard tell that MySpace has initiated some new policy to prevent such things from occuring often, but I'm not up on that, as I don't frequent the site)

However, usually, blog skins are used to express personal preferences and not for neferious wrongdoings. The blog in the link at the beginning of this post is one of the many which offer skins for free. The draw of using these is to make one's blog unique, but some people like to go the extra mile and make their own header, or even go the extra three or four miles and create a whole new skin for themselves. (This should only be attempted by people with initiative. Really.)

The way a blog looks shows how the content might be expressed, and can even express the views of its owner. (Most obvious in the cases of over-obsessed fangirls whose backgrounds have pictures of their favorite celebrity/character/pairing repeated a nystagmus-inducing number of times.) The best way to go about creating a blog, in my opinion, is to leave it easy-to-read (no confusing backgrounds), and to keep it fairly simple. This is the advantage of using pre-created skins. They look fairly professional most of the time and aren't overly annoying. You wouldn't want to have people hitting the back button as soon as they see your page just because it's distracting or obnoxious.