new blog design

I got bored with the old design which happens once in a while.. so I have a new design courtesy of Vladimir Prelovac - obviously with some minor edits by me

There is still a little work to do, the first of which is to figure out why I have started disappearing from Google again - I have obviously done somethign wrong!

Anyhow, most of my readerbase is via RSS which will never see the design so a gentle nudge to those users to come on over and take a look

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

I am amazed it has been such a long time but I took a conscious decision to stop being picky about the design/layout of my posts back on August 3rd and removed my own requirement to have an image on every post.

The reason for the decision in the first place was simple - I removed posts I hadn’t got round to sorting an image out for because they were no longer timely or interesting - in effect I was censoring myself. Since then 99% of posts have just been text and the volume and frequency of posts has increased.

But has it devalued the look and feel of the blog? I think in some small way it is not as easy to read, certainly longer posts. For long posts, it is just too much text - I like visual aids when moving through text

As I look through my RSS feed, there are a lot of people who write long posts that I find myself skimming. Some with images, some without. I find that if an image catches my eye I may give it more attention than a post without images so for longer posts at least it should improve interaction with your readers.

So do I go back to adding photos? I think it’s a question of using quality images rather than using one every post and more important still, not letting the lack of an image stop you from posting in the first place.

Everyone raves about akismet - the spam system used by wordpress (which powers this blog). It is great at stopping comment spam but cleaning up what is caught is just a pain. There needs to be some scoring system or a way of filtering the list so I can skim through it more easily. Spam Karma colour codes spam caught so you can visually see which items are possibly false positives.

In a previous post I said: over time things are slowly being removed from my blog and into facebook. Personal photo albums have gone, and it cant be long before video, books and last.fm disappear leaving my blog much more focussed on what it does best - delivering personal (or other’s) commentary. It’s slowly becoming less and less of a black hole for information about the author.

A couple of friends asked me why I didn’t move all content creation entirely into facebook?

I initially thought this was an easy one to answer - I import my posts into facebook as there is an audience there but that it was a closed environment. For it to be suitable, I needed to be able to deliver the content back out into aggregators using RSS. Except it turned out Facebook had this capability. You can see it here.

So why not use Facebook?

It came down to not feeling like the correct place - Facebook feels like a more personal arena - not really a place for business orientated content. I wonder if Facebook can make that perception change? Would I move then? Well they would need to be searchable on the open web - and I would want to be able to control layout more. Wouldn’t Facebook just turn into a proprietary version of the web if all that happened? That wouldn’t make sense to do, right? We already have one of those..

I’m a regular reader of a vc and in a recent post he talked about one of his investments in a company called tumblr. To use his words “It’s the next logical step in the blogging phenomenon. It allows you to blog quickly, easily, from your phone or your computer, it encourages reblogging and pulling content in from twitter, typepad, wordpress, blogger, flickr, delicious, last.fm, etc, etc”

Sounds interesting..

But do I really need another aggregator of information? I already have my blog, facebook and to a very limited extent Linkedin. Broadly speaking, I use facebook to track my personal stuff, Linkedin for my work stuff and my blog for writing about things that interest me. None of it is perfect and thats what made me look at tumblr.

The problem with the other aggregators.

Facebook - it just doesn’t do a good job of letting me decide who can see what. But for public stuff using addons I will over time be able to aggragate all this info there. The downside - I have little control over the layout today. But it’s easy to use.

My blog - over time things are slowly being removed from my blog and into facebook. Personal photo albums have gone, and it cant be long before video, books and last.fm disappear leaving my blog much more focussed on what it does best - delivering personal (or other’s) commentary. It’s slowly becoming less and less of a black hole for information about the author.

LinkedIn - the orginal place for all my work contacts - it does nothing more - I wonder whether this will shift into a group within facebook because of this - what if it did allow you to aggregate work related content? Would I use it more?

So again I wonder why use tumblr. Fred Wilson’s tumblr page reminds me of the news feed inside facebook. There is no context so flickr photos are mixed with twitter posts which in turn is mixed with blog posts. Sure I get to see everything Fred Wilson - is that useful?