Blog Housekeeping
Posted on October 6, 2006
5 Comments
I read a post over at the 9rules blog titled, “What is your site about?” and that got me thinking about some things this morning. While I’m pretty confident I know what my site is about, I’ll concede it was less than obvious from looking at the old sidebar.
I was still showing the default category list, but frankly, most of my posts go into the “tech” category and I differentiate them with tags (via the UTW Plugin). Since I was only showing the tags on the Tags Page, that wasn’t overly useful for a first time visitor.
Now you’ll see I no longer list the categories over there in the side. Instead, I list commonly used tags right below the search bar. I’m experimenting still with numbers and sizes for that tag list… but if you want to see all the tags, go to the Tags page.
There’s still room for improvement though. As you can see, listing the top x tags covers a lot of territory as time goes on. Ideally, that could would show the top x tags for the last y months. Alas, I’m not sure if that’s possible with UTW. I also wonder if I should add one of those little “About” blurbs at the top of the sidebar. But then I wonder just how much stuff I can stuff into a sidebar!
Maybe that’s my incentive to get going on my next theme design with some more options for placements.
Tags: blog, ultimate-tag-warrior
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5 Responses to “Blog Housekeeping”
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search, tags, google ads, then comment roll.
As much as I like tag clouds, heck. I use them myself… I wonder if ‘normal’ web-users get the size thing or if they just think ‘wow, those are hard to read’ and maybe putting the tag in significance order but still in a readble font would be better. I’m struggling with that now in my blog. What if I’m only here for your hamachi comments… I can barely read the tag to find it.
Good timing on the cloud comments. I was just tweaking… made the smallest size bigger and the biggest size a wee bit smaller.
You think comment roll should be “below the fold”? I’ve gone back and forth on it.
As an avid blog reader I hardly ever pay attention to the comment roll except on a select few… it’d be an interesting metric to see how often those links are followed but I don’t know how you’d do that to find out if they’re used.
tag cloud is much more readable.