I ought to clarify what is happening here.
First, this is a live redesign. This is not the sort of thing I would ordinarily do, since all of the rough edges, design holes, and conceptual flaws are open to the casual observer, a situation I loathe. Rather it is a device to goad myself into making the damn thing work already , with the added prodding of my friends (especially Nils , who has been the most vocal of those insisting I get my thoughts back onto the web.
Second, I have some mildly radical ideas about how to handle archives and whatnot, and I’ll be experimenting with them here. Y’see, I’ve never been satisfied with the way that most blogs handle old entries. Some blogs are searchable, some you can browse by date (a feature I’ve never found useful, since I am sure you wrote a little something about a particular topic but I am never sure just when that was), in almost all you can look at a listing of old work by category, but only rarely are those categories sufficiently meaningful to help winnow the content enough to make browsing successful.
Besides, categories are much like folders: a seemingly logical one-to-many classification system that is hard to maintain and hides relevant content in a single location. Sure, people are starting to use tags, but unless the tag set is well-maintained, you’ve got a content fragmentation problem that is the flip of the categorization problem. And don’t get me started about tag clouds! Anyone else find these a waste? (Show of hands.) But I digress.
In print, at least, I find it pretty easy to skim a list of well-written titles (such as the chapter and section titles in a thoughtfully-constructed table of contents) while looking for something relevant, so I’ll be experimenting with that idea here. On the homepage (“the latest”), below the most recent entry and some associated whatnot, I’ll drop a list of titles (“the digest”) in an attempt to foster this sort of skim-browsing. This will depend, of course, on well-written titles.
There’s also the wee problem with entry types. Not categories (bees, food, weapons), nor sections (news, features, business, local), but the kind of content represented within an entry. I find that I have a desire to write a long entry occasionally, but am much more likely to dash off a small handful of asides here and there, and need somehow to accommodate these two flavors of entry, with appropriate attention to the design and metadata requirements thereof. So I’ll be fooling about with some options there. (A classic example of asides: Jason Kottke’s Remaindered Links .) The first attempt: put the most recent handful of asides just below the latest long entry, with its own XML feed, and capture a larger set of them on a purpose-built archive page.
Third, this is an experiment in vertical rhythm. While I have successfully cajoled more than one colleague into attempting to establish a baseline grid one website or another, I’ve never given it a solid try myself. The vertical pacing that a baseline grid lends (and the typographic options that are suggested and/or denied by same) can do wonders for a layout much as a horizontal grid does, but they tend to be sparsely represented on the web due to how type must be specified in CSS. I’ll try some techniques here, and as I experiment and uncover the vagaries of type on the web, I’ll write more about this.
Anyhow, mind your head. Most everything is not in place here yet.
