Taking inventory of my virtual home (blog) :: Llama and Lamb :: Personal blog of Rachel and Stephen

Taking inventory of my virtual home (blog)

Minimalism is the opposite of the standard blog layout. Blog authors tend to link everything on every page to every other page. I’m trying to reject the 100 person blog roll in the sidebar attitude for something simpler. For the last week, I’ve been burning the midnight oil to consider changes to the Rachel and Stephen blog. I’ve listed some features a blogger might want to add (Twitter mini-blog, expanded footer) and some features he or she might want to remove (sidebar). Discretion that is the essence of design.

Ch-Ch-Changes. . .

The key changes so far are to the homepage:

Less sidebar information (No photo slideshow, no popular posts, categories)
Recent posts are listed within the post navigation,
Addition of RSS link in sidebar
Smaller height of title/header
Sidenotes added to sidebar

Hi, my name is Stephen and I Twitter

Sidenotes are now at the top of the sidebar. These will be notes that do not quite make a full post. Matthew Mullenweg of WordPress-fame pioneered the idea of the “Aside” mini-post years ago. The majority of them will be 140 character tweets posted from Twitter. You can also follow me directly on Twitter, my username is stevillama. I tend to post a few posts a day. You can view them as status updates (ala Facebook), but more often they will be links to useful websites, quick help to friends, and recommendations for the Twittersphere. I’ve removed direct Tweets from being recorded on this blog, since that be more like recording IM chats, and I stopped do that at the end of high school.

Wait! There’s More–Footers!

I will add a footer with many, many features (too many) maybe some of the following:

Repeat Navigation
Affiliates/Directories
Social Networks
Recommended Reading
Donations
BlogLog/Photos of visitors
Search
Call to Action
Quotes
TagCloud
Popular posts

And I’m not done, if you subscribe to my blog in the next 60 seconds. . .

I might buy another domain for this personal journal. Yes, journal. I hope that this site, Rachel and Stephen, will become more of a journal. I’ll probably still allow comments, but that’s the direction I’m heading. You can rest assure this site will not turn into a “MySpace/LiveJournal I’m so tired / it’s so late / I hate the world” blog. I shutter and recoil at the thought.

Stay tuned for further updates for I do not presently have a timeline. Do personal projects ever have timelines? I hope that your user experience may be improved with the upcoming changes.

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