Been goofing around with the setup here again. Biggest change: the landing page is gone. It was sort of redundant anyway, and I think it was having a negative impact on my Google ranking because it was pretty much content free, except for all the links (Google apparently doesn’t like that). So it’s gone. All the links to recent postings that were there — in case you found them useful — are now on the main blog home page, below the list of recent comments that has been there for quite a while now, and then regular blog postings continue below that.
I realize that’s a big batch of links now coming between the most recent blog posting here and the next ones, but I’ve haven’t yet had a brainstorm for a better way to deal with that. I’m keeping it in mind, though, and maybe I’ll come up with something eventually.
The home page now features more recent postings that it used to, since I’m generally posting more each day than I used to. Also new: monthly archives, accessible via the dropdown menu in the righthand column. Each month has its own page listing all the postings of that month. (The category archives are still accessible via the listing at the bottom of that righthand column — I tried to come up with a dropdown for those, too, but the subcategories throw the scheme off, and it’s too confusing without the hierarchy. I’ll keep working on trying to find a way to fix that, too.)
I know change can be stressful, but hopeful not too much is upsetting here. I welcome your suggestions, of course, and absolutely do please let me know if you run across any funky behavior or outright error messages. My programming skills are acquired strictly on a phonetic basis, and sometimes speaking that language without really understanding what you’re doing causes all sorts of unintended consequences. I don’t think that’s happened here, but let me know if it has.
FWIW, I say just drop the recent reviews and articles blocks. They are redundant and they interfere with the flow. Your web programming is completely fine; it’s just a matter of choosing clean over clutter.
I think you were right to remove the landing page -> that’s a 90’s convention whose time is past.
I think you have a very functional site – if you didn’t self deprecate, I’d never know it wasn’t programmed by a pro.
viewed in Firefox 3.0
Good decisions all around, I think! Things are more accessible now. I had a hard time adjusting to your previous round of changes but I think these most recent ones are fantastic.
Keep the awesome coming.
~j
I’m not 100% on the mechanics behind it, but the only things that “name” this blog are the image that reads “The Flick Filosopher” and the HTML title. You might need a little text somewhere (an alt attribute tag to the title image) that reads “The Flick Filosopher”.
I like that you nixed the front page (which was always fairly useless) but I don’t like the big “recent posts” boxes you have cluttering up the blog now. Personally, I don’t think they’re necessary at all, but if you’re set on including them I think they’d work better in the left sidebar below the ads.
Does anyone want to defend those link boxes? I’d rather get rid of them myself, but if there are folks finding them useful, I’d like to know that.
Geez, I never actually noticed that before. Thanks for pointing it out.
No problem. For search purposes, the search analyzers will read TEXT as opposed to trying to interpret an image that you or I could read easily. :)
It will be a ways till we must bow to our digital search engine masters.
Also you might want to throw some meta keywords tags into your head (don’t overdo it) and properly tag each and every blogpost for organizational search purposes.
Put me down as another person who’d be happy to see the linkboxes go, or at least be moved over to the left side. Otherwise, everything looks good. I’m in agreement on getting rid of the landing page. The only time I’ve visited that in years was just to see your bias meter when it was up there and I remembered to check it.