Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Blog improvements

During these days I've spent some time in improving my blog.
Despite of how much difficult is to customize Blogger blogs, I've got very good results!
Here are the improvements:

  • A new three columns layout (found here), with two sidebars.

  • A "Categories" section in the left sidebar, for browsing my posts per categories, supported by the great del.icio.us service: it took me some hours to make this work, but now I'm very proud and glad!
    I think this is very useful, and I've started to tag every old post.

  • Again in the left sidebar, a section with comments related to most recent posts, specifically those posts in the main page: this makes following discussions a lot easier.

  • In the bottom side of the right sidebar, a link for adding my blog to your Technorati Favorites, for making easy searches in your favorites blogs.


Hope this will make our blog experience a lot better ... and funnier!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Even though it looks really good, I find the new layout harder to use. The articles get to be pretty long and narrow and hard to read.

It would be more functional if the middle column was wider. Alternatively, you could place the full text of each article on a separate page with more room for content and keep the front page as it is, but with only the introduction to each article.

The left column looks really slick, but I noticed that the little arrows look clickable. It could be a good idea to make them clickable, as there seems to be no way to go to an article that doesn't yet have any comments.

Sergio Bossa said...

Johannes Brodwall said...

> Even though it looks really good, I
> find the new layout harder to use.
> The articles get to be pretty long
> and narrow and hard to read.

Articles have the same space than before, maybe they seem narrower because of the other sidebar ...
However I agree with you, posts should be wider but I've tried and this is very hard in Blogger ... I'll keep looking for a solution ...

> Alternatively, you could place the
> full text of each article on a
> separate page with more room for
> content and keep the front page as
> it is, but with only the
> introduction to each article.

Articles already have each their own page, you have to click to the time link at the bottom of the post space...
Showing only a post summary in the main page could be an idea ... and what do you think about making possible to show/hide (expand/collapse) full posts in the main page?

> The left column looks really slick,
> but I noticed that the little
> arrows look clickable. It could be
> a good idea to make them clickable,
> as there seems to be no way to go
> to an article that doesn't yet have
> any comments.

Yes, you are right.
There's a bug in Blogger template tags, but I hope to get a workaround for making arrows or blog titles clickable!

Your feedback was very valuable.
Thanks much,

Regards,

Sergio B.