If you are up for a little intellectual reading, you may want to check out a personal / spiritual blog called Punctum Saliens. The owner of the blog is a computer programmer, though you would never guess after spending some time in the blog content. He urges you to ‘take a flying leap and see where you land’. The blogger writes from the philosophy of ‘If you’re gonna do that, you gotta…..’ which means his blog is focused on inconsistencies in the world in the way people think. He tries to point out where we make arbitrary lapses in logic, where one way of thinking or one rule implies another, but we don’t go that far. Being brought up in a fundamentalist Christian home, he notes this may affect his writing as he admits he has some observations on that as well. Largely however, he is trying to do something artistic and far reaching with his blog, and hopes his readers constructively comment on his thought processes as he does not believe he will learn very much from his own writing and wishes to see alternatives. Confused yet? Good! Because it is the blog content that really speaks to the nature of the writer and to understand this, you need to check out his recent bloggeries: Man’s task is….;Ah, to be a pre-tribulationalist/pre-millenialist; Anais Nin and Carl Jung; Syndrome….causes [some[to….[see] the Messiah; The Psychic Mediator; Seeing God through Polarized Sunglasses; Jesus is back, and this time he’s funny; and The Creation of Consciousness.
The blogger is clearly dedicated to the writing portion of the blog and thus there is little blog meat to distract the reader. This makes the blog very easy to navigate. Bloggeries are left marginalized with standard black text on white background and there is both a top and a right navigation bar. In the top navigation bar you will find links to Blog (ie. Home), About, Quotes, Creed, Books, Archives, and subscription links. In the right navigation bar you will find a Latest Posts Menu and a Blogs I Visit menu. The only navigational aspect I found difficult was that the Categories Menu was listed on the Archives page. I would recommend moving that to the home page, as the categories menu is extensive and if someone wanted to read on a specific topic, say, C.G. Jung, the blog would be much more easy to navigate. Currently there are no pictures with any of the bloggeries, though if you find yourself immersed in the blog, you will find yourself immersed in the blog. Truly the content is king with this blog and the read is a very intellectually stimulating one. There is no need for pictures with these bloggeries as in fact, they would more than likely distract from the content that is so rich.
I am going with a 4.5 for this blog, it did well on all accounts for scoring criteria. The first suggestion I have for this blogger is to move the Categories menu to the main page as not many readers will check out the Archives section. A few points were lost for activity as well as bloggeries are coming in not on a steady basis, and activity ranges from every few days to a week or more in between bloggeries. Content however is outstanding, and this blogger’s graduate level work is definitely noticeable. The blogger states in his about page that if eloquence is something one is born with, he has some worries as he hopes that it is more a talent he hopes to nurture. Clearly this is not something the blogger needs to worry about as his eloquence is the most noticeable thing about the blog. Appearance and uniqueness scores are excellent as well. The blog is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. Couple those with the excellent content, and it does very well for review.
-Chrissie
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