For my review, I viewed Jessica Lin’s blog, L-inconsistently Treading Through Life, at www.linconsistent.ca. Although it is early, with only four weeks of posts, her online self is already coming across very clearly.
Jessica’s website is at its best when her voice comes through. She communicates through storytelling, much like telling a friend a funny story, using humor and self-awareness. This is clear in her Week 1 post, where she shares an embarrassing story about walking thirty loops around downtown to find a cafe. Later in the same post, she rates her O Sushi lunch a blunt 4/10 and gives very specific reasons for it. Her site also has a good balance of material. Competitive Valorant, Pokémon cards, Muay Thai, food, and student life are all mixed together. These topics give me a picture of someone who is busy, fun loving, and a little spontaneous, which matches the name of her blog. The menu label Life’s Patch Notes is a great idea too, since gaming language adds to the creativity of her site.
Her Week 4 Thanksgiving post is a good example of what Suler (2004) calls benign disinhibition, which is when people share more freely online than they would in person. Jessica shows this when she describes how drunk she was at dinner and that she then slept for 15 hours. This openness is what makes the blog feel authentic. Her blog also connects to Mod (2017), who wrote about his month offline and what he noticed when he stepped away from the internet and his phone. Jessica’s posts do not feel like she is performing for an audience. They feel like real moments from her week, told in her own words, which makes her online self feel like an honest extension of who she is offline. That is a big part of why her blog is easy to keep reading.
In terms of design, the website has a clean appearance. A single readable column, a simple three item menu, and very little clutter mean nothing competes with her writing. My first suggestion is to add a short introduction or a photo of Jessica at the top of her homepage, so visitors know who she is right away. Second, her posts contain long sections of text. The Pokémon card and family photos she has already included work well, and adding a few more photos or the occasional subheading would make her posts even easier to skim. Finally, although the errors are minor, she would benefit from reviewing each post before publishing. A few typos, including restraunt, definetly, and oppurtunity, take away from the quality of her voice.
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