It occurs to me that Skykicking doesn't really fit in with the top echelons of the blogging community, simply because I fail spectacularly at providing two of the main qualities of weblogs: cool links and elegant design. The second is because I'm clueless (can someone please tell me how I find out how many hits I'm getting?), and the first is because I don't surf randomly, so I never find much of note. However I'll lie and say it's an active choice; that by leaving out the window dressing I'm trying to focus the attention (of the readers, and my own) on the words themselves, so as to better wring out every last drop of worth from them. Certainly the stark simplicity of
Josh Blog makes me all the more interested in what Josh has to say, quite apart from the excellence of his writing. On the other hand, blogs like
Barbelith, which manages to find a balance between attention to content and more aesthetic concerns, are perhaps even more impressive.