Snoskred – Life in the Country

From time to time I find a new Australian blog which makes me get all tingly in my outer limbs with excellent writing, great design, amazing photography or just plain old fashioned humor. I think we Australians don’t give a lot of credit to ourselves as writers, photographers or bloggers in general. Many of us respect *other* Australian bloggers but we try to diminish ourselves as bloggers. It’s a uniquely Australian trait to say “Look what (insert someone else here) did” while completely overlooking what we ourselves did.

I have been to the majority of the top 100 Aussie blogs. I’d say 99% of the top Aussie bloggers are community orientated people, willing to support others in their efforts. That is one thing I love about the Australian Blogs Community.

Today I want to tell you about two new blogs I found after Neerav Bhatt sent me an email asking if I could give a heads up to voters in Australia – they needed to register to vote fast if they weren’t registered already due to changes in the law. I know I was not the only Australian blogger to receive that email. That in itself is utterly unique. Going out of ones way to help others is something I love to see and I wish there was more of it in the world today.

Another thing I love to see is a good About Me page – and Neerav does not disappoint. Bloggers, I have seen a lot of about me pages. Some of them are ok. Some of them short, uninformative and I leave the page feeling none the wiser about the blogger – it’s called an ABOUT me page! Go have a look at this one – Everything you ever wanted to know about Neerav Bhatt – and then take a look at your own, and think about it carefully.

Looking at this about me page I can think of a few things I need to add to mine. I’m even thinking about *gulp* adding a pic. It would be an older one for security reasons but I think ya’all would be ok with it. It is wonderful to know so much about someone before even *reading* their blog so well done Neerav on the about me page!

Checking out your books I see we both love James Herriot. And two of your favourite movies are also.. my favourite movies. The Shawshank Redemption and Office Space. Something else we have in common is photography (see Neerav’s picasa albums here ) and some of your photos are simply stunning! You have gone one step further than me and created some free computer desktop wallpaper . Take a look at this photo -

You should click on the thumbnail or else you may not see what is special about this image. Being a photographer myself I know that a shot like this is a matter of being in the right place at the right time as well as about a hundred other factors which can easily ruin a good shot quicker than you can blink.

Neerav has two blogs and I knew I had seen The Road Less Travelled (59th on the Top 100 Aussie Blogs List) before because of that stunning header graphic. The Rambling Thoughts Blog (47th on the Top 100 Aussie Blogs List) was new to me but every article on the front page was well written, enjoyable and extremely informative.

I love it when I visit a blog and find a piece of information I didn’t know I wanted but once I have it I get all excited about it. There was several such pieces of information on both blogs. There’s a great post about Australian Political blogs, some of which I have bookmarked for later exploration. I’m so out of the loop when it comes to commercial television, I had no idea Shaun Micallef has a new show. I have recently spotted a few good episodes of The Sideshow with Paul Mcdermott, I’d be interested to see a blog post with your thoughts on that.

Let’s talk color schemes and themes for a moment. Neerav has used my two favourite colors, green on The Road Less Travelled which has two sidebars and blue on Rambling Thoughts Blog which has one sidebar. Both look very professional but The Road Less Travelled is extra crispy and fresh thanks to the green. I’ve said many times that green is my favourite color to use on a website. More and more sites are starting to use it. I think Rambling Thoughts could use a tricked out header graphic like The Road Less Travelled has – just to make it stand out as a blog.

The policy of writing one to two quality posts each week rather than being just another blog in the blogosphere echo chamber commenting on the same things everyone else is writing about is an excellent idea. You write beautiful and informative articles – the travel ones on the road less travelled are especially excellent – I did not know the Sydney public transport planner existed and I’ll be using that myself. Your info about getting around Adelaide is also great – having lived there all my life. And one of the things I miss most is the Museum there – free and fantastic.

The only thing missing on both the blogs is an I Reply policy. I think Neerav could delight his commentors if he replied to their comments regularly – I have seen that he replies from time to time. I try to reply to the comments on every post I write. I don’t always get there – and sometimes it takes me a few days to get back to them as I want to let people have time to comment – but committing to doing it has worked for me here on this blog. You’re not posting daily so this will be a lot easier for you to do than it is for me to do.

People love it when you reply to them and you have the notify me tick box – a lot of people (me included) will tick that and come back to comment a second or even third time on a post. I spotted a post where you did reply – Photos from Outback South Australia, The Red Centre and Tropical Top End – and I love how your comment shows up in a dark green box.

How do you make an RSS feed for photos, though? A how to post on that would be wonderful – maybe you could do one as a part of our Tuesday Think Tank sometime? We’ll make the topic photography.

It is not often that I buy a CD and like every track on it. In fact it is incredibly rare that I like a CD enough to want to write about it on my blog. Even with a favourite artist there is usually something which doesn’t sit right or something I don’t like. How many times do you buy a CD and find out later you only like 2 or 3 tracks? I hate that. That is exactly why so many people download music these days.

A couple of months ago we bought some CD’s. For long drives The Other Half likes something with a beat, something that keeps him awake. We had a few Madonna tracks on our compilation CD’s and I have always liked her music but I had no idea what a treat we were in for when we bought Confessions On A Dance Floor. If you like your music without all the ho’s and beeyotches that you find in (c)rap these days and you enjoy dance music, you will enjoy this cd.

You may recall a couple of the songs from this album – if nothing else you may remember the film clip where Madonna was dancing in a pink leotard. Yes, the outfit was just wrong for several reasons, not the least of which was the tan panti-hose which ended mid calf. However it is mesmerizing to watch precisely because it is so wrong.

This was soon followed by the track “Sorry” which contained a couple more equally wrong outfits, namely a purple leotard and silver leotard. The ugly tan panti hose was thankfully nowhere to be seen.

Every track is wonderful but my favourite would be Future Lovers which is like taking a bath in bass when it gets played in the car, and I love the “Give me evidence of his brilliance” lyric, and the harmonies. There’s no official film clip for this track but I found the song on you tube anyway.

The bottom line is simply this. When I have to do housework I like to put music on that makes me move and this music is exactly that. It’s just over 55 minutes long and that is the perfect time – you do chores till it’s done, then you take a break for 5-10 minutes. This CD has been played over and over while we moved, at least once a day for almost two months. I still enjoy it as much as I did the first time I listened to it.

Madonna has always been a controversial strong female artist. She doesn’t do those silly high notes like Mariah does. Her voice is much more sing along and Confessions On A Dance Floor is much more dance along than any of her other albums that I can recall. If you don’t have it and you like the tracks posted as videos above? Keep an eye out for it because if you liked that you’ll enjoy the entire cd.

Obviously this was not a sponsored post – I wish it could have been! I wonder why music artists don’t seek reviews from bloggers because if we like something we’re going to tell everyone. Maybe there’s not enough money in music these days with all that downloading.