more and more often, in the past few weeks, I found myself in the odd condition of having something to say and that I feel "appropriate" for this place, and yet it was the place (blog) itself that didn't feel "right" anymore. People changes over time, fashion and voices change over time... and I suppose there are times for a blog to follow the same route.
So when on saturday morning I discovered that all the files I had hosted on DreamHost where gone (only temporarily, as I gladly discovered later in the day), I decided to devote part of the weekend to start renewing the image of codewitch.org a bit.
Before continuing, let me say that I still haven't achieved all the goals I'm looking forward to, but since I don't know when I'll have more time to work on this, I thought it would be better to start sharing my considerations and plans now.
I chose a few guidelines to work with:
. "simple, informal, practial" layout and typefaces
. try to reduce the number of interactors "aggregating" where possible based on task
. give the reader the opportunity to figure out (and possibly experience) the context that originated one entry, leveraging on the life stream data (the aggregated list of events collected from other points of presence on the net, e.g. flickr, upcoming, twitter, del.icio.us)
. provide, where possible, different layers or zoom factors to consider the website content from.
Clean layout and typeface
This was the easy part. I started from the nice cutline theme, recently ported to MT4 by Byrne Reese, added a custom header and helvetica-fied all of it.
I also dramatically reduced the line height, that gives me agoraphobia everytime I look at Cutline blogs. I'm still not happy with the entry metadata line, maybe I could stick it all on a phantom left column, or maybe I could just get rid of it... we'll see.
Reducing Interactors
This blog usede to have an ajax powered search tool.
Now, the search has been disabled, mainly because I don't trust perl CGI performance on Dreamhost and because, let's face it, Google has all the answers: personally I grew so addicted to its pervasive assistance that more often than not, seconds after landing on a webpage looking for something specific, I hit cmd-K and refine the search from there without even looking for an internal search widget. Moreover, as you may notice from the elsewhere column, my data is more and more spread all across the web in a series of vertical silos, thus a "local" search is less and less relevant for an "identity" blog such as this one (identity being very different from meaning personal, but this is a long story).
So the bottomline is that search (maybe google powered) could make it back, but it's lower priority (unless somebody starts screaming out loud, that is).
Archive navigation is another interesting issue: it would be nice to provide a consistent metaphor for category, date, and possibly tag oriented navigations.
In the latest version of this blog there were "select" fields to navigate through category and monthly archives. Tags were browsable through a tag cloud.
Now, tag cloud remains an interesting metaphor for tags, provided that the tagspace is kept reasonably healthy. This means pruning the dictionary, creating clusters, renaming tags to cope with the evolution of the language or the conventions... and I can't see that happening easily (at present, this blog defines 673 tags). As for monthly and category archives, categories of this blog are a lot more than necessary (partly because this blog predates the tag era) so in a perfect world I should refactor them back to a manageable 4/5 headcount; this would make the "select" navigation option pretty useless (actually unconvenient, since the 4/5 pretty determinant category names will be hidden in the select). Time can't be refactored though, and this blog has more than 5 years of archives. Even if not all months have entries, there is still a considerable amount of voices to consider, so much so that the select field could be less than ideal.
So I was thinking of experimenting with a normal list for categories, paired with a similarly styled accordion based navigation for the dates. This should grant (at least in this phase) a good balance between visible information and effort required from the reader.
This is going to be it for today, next: context through lifestream and zoom factor.
Leave a comment