Chekhov's Mistress
Google to Buy Chekhov’s Mistress for 4 billion dinars
I don’t know. The guy on the phone had a thick accent; I think he said dinars. He didn’t seem to know what I meant when I asked him old or new and I haven’t heard from him since. To celebrate though, we’ve put in a few new changes around here:
1) Entirely new design.
As I mentioned on my previous, late night, just finished, post, my design goal was to get as much content on the page without forcing clicks to other pages and have a logical, non-distracting layout for past content. I’ve managed to incorporate two little java scripts to accomplish most of that, and as you’ll see, entries can be expanded on the page and comments (as I’ve had for a while) can be expanded on the page too.
You can also click through about 4 pages of past content, which right now (with the fourth page being longer than the others) takes you back an entire year. imagine that.
2) Bloglet email subscription.
It seems to work now. I’ve had some requests for email and this seems like the best solution, although I’m alarmed that it’s only a daily service – I mean, my God, who could want to see my stuff every day.
3) Added photoblog and photoblog commentary (unrelated to CM content)
The truth is I don’t care much about traffic to the photoblog. It’s just that I don’t know what to do with all the damn pictures that I take and at least posting them up on the blog makes me realize how bad they are and makes me want to think a little more about them. Perhaps the point of blogging and its discourse anyway.
4) RSS feed includes keywords and comments (index.rdf only).
I’ve been using keywords on my posts for a while now (listed on the archive page as well), so I’ve added them to the feed. I may also use that space for introductory statements such as the one on the post. Although comments don’t play as large a role on this site as on others, conceptually I believe they are important, so I’ve added them to the feed as well.
5) Blogroll more organized, new links page.
I now have a page of links, which I will hope will be useful as I’ve organized it in terms of activity. If you’re looking for news, for instance, I’ve put some blogs that often link to news stories together along with a listing of some of the other sites that have frequent updates of literary news and reviews. Most blogs are under the heading of “literary discussion,” and are organized categorically, such as “academic,” “poetry,” etc. Classification is a difficult task – suggestions always welcome. I’ve also broken down the blogroll a bit and that is on the links page as well as on the sidebar. I’m still adding many new links.
For the litblogs there is an OPML file, which can be uploaded to your news aggregator of choice.
6) Headlines page.
I’ve had litblog headlines as part of the site for a while now and I think some find it useful. Now headlines are available on the sidebar (just scroll on past the three headlines from my own sites) as well as a full page with 50 of the latest posts from our friends on the blogroll. The 50, by the way, excludes commercial sites like the NY Times and they are segregated on the sidebar.
Concluding remarks:
I think if anything, the blogosphere has proven that pretty site design is completely irrelevant to good content, so spending hours upon hours on redesigning a site may seem misguided. Still, I think the worth of content must be more than its Google after life, so when I dress up my site I do more for the idea that content (in general more than my own) should be accessible and related. This site represents the accessible part (not yet for those who are visually impaired, although it must be a future consideration) and the ‘related’ part doesn’t come easily, hence my recommendation on the archives page to use your browser’s find function to search keywords. It’s all an experiment and something of an illusion (of grandeur perhaps) that this site design, as well as its content in other ways, adds something to the forwarding of the world of the blog.
Attribution:
There are two primary sites (people) that I have learned from in structuring and designing this site: SimpleBits, whose creator Dan Cederholm wrote the invaluable Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook, and Learning MovableType, which has so many techniques on creating good blogs (much of which can easily be transported to TypePad) that it’s amazing that it’s free.
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