Fair Review

If you don’t want to participate in a direct blog review exchange through the “I Review Movement” (I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t.) there is a new option available to you.

One of our frequent commentators here, Rhys from The Gospel According to Rhys, has launched The Fair Review Project.

To participate in The Fair Review Project you choose a blog from the member list and post a review of it on your blog. After your review is judged to have met the requirements your blog will be added to the list of members giving you a good, solid, front page link with the possibility of being reviewed yourself and the traffic that will generate.


For my review I chose Jemjabella.co.uk.

The first thing I noticed when visiting Jemjabella is the design; unique, clean, business, not girly at all, very professional. Upon investigation I was surprised to learn it’s not a Wordpress template. She coded the whole thing by hand and no doubt deserves the title she has given herself of PHP Ninja.

Her writing is straightforward and no-nonsense. She gives advice to solve the most complicated coding issues as well as tutorials that a beginner can follow. Her reviews of how-to and tutorial sites are ruthless but if the sites she reviews, after licking their wounds and crawling out from under whatever shelter they felt it necessary to dive under, implement her suggestions they would find themselves improved.

One requirement for this review is that I choose a favorite post to link to. That task proved to be almost impossible and I strongly recommend just going to the articles page and settling in for a good read. As a new blogger I had to choose Jem’s Top Traffic Tips as my favorite post. By following just one of her tips yesterday afternoon I got 12 hits that I would not have gotten. (Tip – Submit your own article to Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit.)

I haven’t even covered the free scripts she offers as well as resources from other sites she generously links to. I have purposely avoided reviewing her articles and comments about coding because they are completely over my head and I am in no way qualified to offer an opinion.

I was at first intimidated by this blog because of the ‘techyness’ but after reading for a few moments I was put at ease. While her criticisms are sharp and her posts sarcastic, I found her primary concern to be the communication of quality information to her readers and that is worth a lot.

I am now a subscriber to Jemjabella, you can subscribe too by clicking here.