May 1, 2010

Blogging Re-Organization

One thing about writing a blog hardly anybody reads...I can play with the format as much as I want without confusing many people. I can tweak to my heart's content, which I've done yet again today. First thing...I moved my tag cloud to the bottom of the page. As the cloud lists every tag in order of frequency - and I'm tagging widely - it uses up too much space in the side bar. Next up, I reduced the number of blog entries shown per page to five, mostly because of my moving the tag cloud to the bottom of the page. People are used to seeing those clouds at the bottom of the page; this way there's less scrolling down required in order to get to it.

Thirdly, I adjusted how the blog archives show; instead of listing each individual entry per current month, I've settled for a straight monthly list that indicates the number of blog entries for each month. I did this because directly above the blog archives is a list of the most recent entries (five's the limit). I wish there were a calendar widget available to Blogger blogs like the one I had at blog-city, but none exist that are easy to install, even with my reasonable level of expertise.

Next I removed the "Recent Comments" widget altogether. I think this particular widget is only useful if lots of comments are being posted. There are not. I'm considering removing the "reactions" (vote thumbs up, meh, or thumbs down) option next; we'll see how it goes.

Finally, I broke apart "Recent Reads" into "Recent Reviews" and "Other Recent Reads," providing links to Amazon and within the blog itself for recent reviews. Since there's such a lag time for PW reviews, and I have such a lengthy history of them, I'll continue to flesh out the stand-alone page I created last month specifically for them as time permits. BTW, that review with the error still shows the error and until I see the correction online, it won't be included.


Share/Bookmark

No comments: