A new start…
I first started a blog as a way to keep a daily running of things I found, things I thought, and small notes about projects. It turns out I began to use this tool for much more. I began to post links (and manage them in movabletype as well), photos, rants, geo-political wanderings (how could I not do so given that groups of people want to kill me and my family), and more.
Now that it is well into the year of ours, 2003, I find the format to be limiting to a degree. Without a good taxonomy the whole affair becomes quite a mess. There are fuzzy related entries, which could mean a post about CSS Menu systems is somehow related to democracy in the middle east, simply because I used the same word in the title(!), or, more troubling to me, that my posts which do mean something become lost in the morass of posts which mean little.
Is this a taxonomy problem or is it over examination? After all, a good search engine works wonders (and movabletype’s search engine seems to be pretty great). That said, nothing really replaces well thought out information architecture in a web site (not drop down menus, nor a good search engine). What my site likely does is attract viewers from a wide range of topics. I post on the Canon 10D and the related Canon USA web site (which is an abomination) and it generates a lot of hits for me from outside visitors. I supply some trite comments and they walk away… (another question is do I want an audience? …or, what do I wish or have to give an audience?). These viewers plop down into an individual archive of my blog and bam — where do they find themselves? Is there any veracity? There isn’t much stickiness I can tell you that from looking at the log files reports. I would only hope to be helpful to someone at the end of the day, not frustrating.
It is with this endeavor that a redesign is undertaken. I haven’t found a lot to change about my current look and feel. The simplicity, color, and elegance please me quite a lot. I will make subtle tweaks here and there. It will be the introduction of an information architecture that I hope will improve my use of this tool and the visitor’s happening upon an entry.