It’s not working. I can’t put my finger on it but it’s just “not right”, and it’s beginning to annoy me.
It may be because I’m working on other designs for other sites (two at the moment), it may be because my tastes are changing or that I’m spending more time at other sites, other sites which appeal more, that hit the right buttons. Or it may be that I’m never happy and enjoy the process of change more than the stationary aspects of this thing we call blog.
In a somewhat related note, and this is also related to the previous post, I’ve been wondering about common design standards for a blog. For example, I would guess that by NOT having my ‘logo’ (my name, up there on the left) set as a link to the root of the domain, I’m breaking some sort of unwritten yet agreed blog design rule.
Where does someone new to blogging go to find these rules? Do they exist? SHOULD they exist? Maybe as a set of guidelines? There are plenty of articles that focus on the content side, discussing better writing techniques and the like but very few that discuss what a blog design is and what it should contain.
The most obvious is some way of contacting the owner/author of the site. I lot of people are loathed to put any personal information online but given the proliferation of free email addresses it always amazes me that people don’t use one as a point of contact.
Then of course there are the more ‘advanced’ issues; setting up a robots.txt file, installing some form of statistic tracking scripts, a search facility, considering accessibility issues and so on. Currently I’m toying with adding technorati tags to my posts as a way to let more people access the content here (in the vain hope that someone somewhere may find it useful).
But then, isn’t that part of the fun, the constant innovation, the constant change masquerading as evolution and all the while the only true measure of a blog is the content. No number of fancy scripts and widgets will ever change that.
This is not where I thought I’d end up with this post but hey, I call it as I see it. Speaking of which, Mr. Kottke seems to be publishing at an increasing rate (I wonder how long before it settles down), unfortunately it’s not a lot of new content but he is certainly digging out some interesting stuff. However a lot of it seems to be falling into the category of “stuff that I find interesting but only when someone shows me it”. In other words, it’s good but only as a passing moment of intrigue.
Mind you, given all the vitriol I’m surprised that www.kottkewatch.com hasn’t been snapped up yet.