I ended up spending most of the day today pretty much totally redesigning this blog. I’m still using a theme I changed to a month or two ago, but I finally customized it and got it pretty close to where I want it. If you read from RSS – please come in for a visit check out the new digs!
In this redesign, I wanted to re-focus my blog a bit – to make it more about you (or the community around my blog). I was inspired originally by this post from Robert Merrill and further by this one with some ideas of how to make my blog more about the community. The first objective is to reward/pay back/make it worth your while to interact on this blog. The best way to do that is to give you a link from my humble pagerank of 5 blog. I’m experimenting with a few things to do that:
First, I’ve installed the Do-Follow plugin – every comment/link will be followed by Google. I’m using Akismet and manual approval so I’m not too worried about giving spammers a link.
Second, I’m using a plugin called Top Commentators to create a blog roll of the top commentors in a 30 day rolling window. This provides yet another link to those who are commenting the most. With the 30 day rolling window, it shouldn’t be too hard to show up in the list and get your link. You can see the current top commentors on the left side bar.
Next, I’m listing with a full link the last 10 links coming to this blog. Basically, if you link to me, I’ll link right back at you. You can see those links on the right sidebar.
To help bring conversations and topics to the forefront, I’ve added a few things: On the left sidebar I’m listing the most recent comments, jump in and join the conversation! Next, on the right sidebar there’s a list of 10 random posts from the last couple years that I’ve been writing this blog – something there might be interesting to comment on. Also, I’m listing up to 5 “related” posts on blog post, this should also help bring something up to talk about.
I’ve also configured a delicious plugin to list the last 10 pages I’ve bookmarked in delicious. This will give a recipricol link to anyone who’s article I’ve bookmarked.
Finally, I’m trying out some social networking stuff on the site. I’ve added several badges/widgets that share a lot of the most recent things I’ve done around the internet. I’ve also included a cool little widget that I did a lot of customization/reprogramming on that will let you send me an SMS text message right from the blog. I’ve got unlimited text messaging on my mobile, so feel free to drop me a note!
I’ve tried really hard to pack as much in as I can without making the site too overwhelming/distracting. I spent a lot of time trying to make sure that everything was fairly uniform in style and presentation. Hopefully it isn’t too cluttered.
My last objective is to produce quality blog posts a lot more frequently. I have a lot of posts queued up in my head, my new goal is to get all that out on my blog.
So, what do you think of the new layout/features?
