In the course of the past few “Free For All” discussions we’ve had about the blog, a recurrent theme is the difficulty of finding things we might be interested in. Many folks have considered it a big drawback that we can’t organize the posts by topic on separate pages. Actually, it’s intuitive once you get the hang of it.
To the left is a screenshot of the Home page of the blog. It shows the header listing for Tomek’s Corner Booth post. Note the blue text above the post title –
“The Corner Booth” and “Writing (noun and verb)” – if you click on either of those links you’ll get a list showing all the posts that have that category assigned. Since “Writing…” is the default category, you’ll get a ton of posts, and since we’ve only just begun filing TCB as a post, you’ll only get a couple.
Thus:
Similarly, if you peruse the right-hand extremity of the home page you’ll see this:
which is exactly what it says it is – click on any item in the list and shazaam, there you are.
But wait, there’s more! If you scroll down that list of recent posts, you’ll happen upon this:
Which is a compiled listing of authors and their posts.
Click on any author heading and you get a page with a complete list of that author’s posts.
Scrolling even further down yields – on the extreme right again, this:
which is – guess what – a dropdown list of our post categories. Select one and …wait for it … you get a page with the posts in that category.
So the capability to fetch:
- “new stuff,” (which you don’t really need if you “Follow” the blog), and
- stuff by our favorite writers, and
- stuff that’s topically interesting to us
really is all there on the home page.
I wonder if displaying a tagging system would also help people navigate. I’ve been tagging my posts (they show up at the bottom of the post). Tagging offers a little more specificity than the categories.
I remember in the LiveJournal days, tag “word clouds” seemed to be the popular thing. They showed up on the side of the blog as a sort of run on list of tags, each of which increased and decreased in size depending on how often they were used. It made it easy for people to find posts on particular topics.
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Good idea – done! Thanks Jennifer.
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