Minor cosmetic changes

In the interest of readership and ease of navigation I'm beginning a minor makeover of KevinFreitas.net. As of this morning my homepage has changed from showing only the most recent entry to a summary view of this month's entries. Hopefully it will paint a clearer picture of what's been going on and, more importantly, tempt you with a wider range of possible topics for your reading enjoyment. You'll also notice each post listed on this summary page shows the numbers of comments left and how many related photos have been posted. This new homepage is also similar to what you get when you choose among any month of my journal. To read the full text of any entry just click on its title or the "More »" link after each summary. To return to the new homepage from any entry just click the "Journal" link at the top left my site.

Let me know if this idea is right on or right out! I'll also be adding features soon that will point out hotly talked about entries, a list of entries with the most photos, and random photos among other enhancements.

Comments (6) | To Top

9/20/2004 @ 2:00pm

Nice work so far, my friend. The monthly journal entry listing page is clean, and offers a more compelling view of the archived content than a simple list of links.

Some things to consider... I personally like having the newest entries at the top of a list if I'm showing people what's new and/or changed on the site. I'm doing this similarly to your "Latest Entries" sidebar on my new site. For the entry archives themselves, however, I chose to go with a chronological list ordering. I think chronological works for archives because that's the direction written content flows, onwards and downwards, and it seems time should do the same.

Does it seem overly confusing to have two views of the same material? I think you can spin things such that bloggish entries can be seen as "news" (reverse-chronological) or a "journal" (chronological). Thoughts? I don't even know if I'm expressing my thoughts clearly, but I'm going to shut up now.

by Matt Turner

9/20/2004 @ 2:04pm

... or not.

Quick heads-up. The "Comments" links on the new entry listing pages do not actually show the comments. The comments area remains collapsed. You'll probably have to pass a request variable or figure out how to trigger the JavaScript to expand the comments area.

9/20/2004 @ 4:31pm

All good (and anti-nonsensical) thoughts. I struggled with the chronological order idea. Perhaps I'll try it that way for a while and leave the "recent entries" otherwise.

Should be possible to show the comments when that feature is clicked on. I'm not entirely sure I'm going to stick with the way the show/hide now anyway.

Thanks! ~ Kevin

by KevinFreitas

9/20/2004 @ 4:40pm

Now that I think of it, I may actually do away with this as my homepage and instead use it as a chronological archive and let the homepage be set up to feature recent writing, photos, and gobs of etcetera. That way my homepage will truely be www.kevinfreitas.net and everything else is just icing in the journal/blog cake.

9/20/2004 @ 7:07pm

Yep. That's the route I'm taking: updates on the front page with chronological archives available. Given the paltry readership I currently enjoy on my site, I don't think it really matters a great deal. :) That could change...

9/20/2004 @ 8:56pm

Now we have to set up our RSS feeds so we can use FireFox's "live bookmark" feature on one another's website! We could have our cell phone SMS messaged when the other posts a message on their site.

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