This blog has had its current design for quite awhile now & I’m thinking about a redesign. The big decision for me is whether to drop the current single-column Friendfeed-like design [1] or to just spruce it up a bit.

I like the current design because it puts all my activity in one place (I’m even considering adding some other services into the mix) and it gives me an archive of my Tweets & Delicious bookmarks. [2] This is nice because the lifespan of these services is unknown, yet I’ll always have my blog—even if I quit blogging, I’ll always control that data. Design-wise, I think it works well when I actually distribute my activity across all these services.

However, when I do nothing but post to Twitter for a few weeks at a time, it kind of falls apart, especially if those of you reading this blog already follow me on Twitter, or read my status updates on Facebook (which auto-update from Twitter), etc. In other words, having everything archived in one place is nice for me, but a few little birdies have suggested to me it’s annoying to see the same update in Twitter, Facebook and then my blog. The result, especially since Twitter posts make up a majority of my blog posts nowadays, is that people end up ignoring the blog entirely. You can selectively follow certain categories with RSS, but I’d like to find a way to solve this in the design of the blog itself. Perhaps I should just find another way to archive Twitter posts entirely—maybe using the new Tweet Tweet WordPress plugin.

Anyway, enough rambling. This post, in case you haven’t guessed, is mostly an excuse to procrastinate & to try out the WP-Footnotes plugin I just installed. [3]

Footnotes

  1. Although I’m not actually emulating Friendfeed, which just launched this year. I’ve been using the “Matt’s Asides” approach of mixing in smaller posts with full posts for a few years. Paired with FeedWordPress to import RSS feeds as posts into feed-specific categories & then styling posts in those categories appropriately, you can do some pretty cool things. [↩]
  2. which, btw, it’s so nice to not have to type “del.icio.us” anymore, isn’t it? [↩]
  3. See? Here’s another. [↩]