As noted in my official blog-launching post at midnight this morning, I’m returning to the blogosphere today after a seven-month hiatus with a new blog under a new (old) name: The Living Room Times, the title of my old school newspaper. I’ll have more to say about that name, and its history, a little later.
But the name of this blog isn’t the only thing that’s changed from my previous bloggy efforts. I’m also introducing a bunch of changes and new features, to try and make this blog fulfill the purposes and plans I have for it. Above all, I’m trying to figure out how to keep it fresh, and a worthwhile place to visit, even though the demands of being a father, lawyer, husband and homeowner will make it impossible to blog full-length posts with anything approaching the regularity of the good ol’ days. Here’s some of what I’m come up with to bridge that gap, along with various other changes and features:
• FriendFeed and Twitter posts: As you can see above, my posts to FriendFeed (which are usually just links to articles, websites or whatnot that I find interesting, sometimes with a wee bit of commentary in the text of the link) and my Tweets to Twitter will be automatically imported into this blog, and displayed on the homepage as what I’m calling “mini-posts.”
The idea is to make it easier and less time-consuming to keep the homepage fresh, while still emphasizing the full-length blog posts and not allowing them to be completely drowned out by a cacophony of microblogging. The miniature nature of the “mini-posts” will hopefully accomplish this. (Originally, I was going to put them in the sidebar, like the Linklog of yore, but Becky convinced me that ghettoizing the mini-posts in this way results in most readers simply not seeing them, much less commenting on them. I think she’s right, and if so, this defeats the purpose, obviously.)
That said, if the mini-posts are bugging you by cluttering the homepage, you have the option of viewing the blog without them, by clicking “Blog Only (No Mini-Posts)” in the title bar above.
Incidentally… the reason Greenwich Mean Time is presently the blog’s time zone is because of a timestamp glitch in the plugin I use to import FriendFeed and Twitter posts. I’m hoping to get that fixed soon, at which time I’ll switch over to Mountain Daylight Time for the entire blog.
• Increased role for guestbloggers: Another way I’m hoping to keep the site fresh, despite having far less time to blog than I used to (a situation that the imminent birth of my second daughter won’t make any better!), is by encouraging greater participation by guestbloggers. At the same time, in order to prevent confusion about whose blog this really is, and to avoid the weird situation where I wanted guestbloggers to contribute but didn’t want ideological guest posts that I disagreed with to dominate the homepage for any length of time, I’ve created “The Guest Room,” which is where all guestblog posts (except Becky’s, and possibly some “Breaking News” type posts) will go by default.
New posts to the Guest Room will be announced on the main blog homepage by a gray-colored mini-post, and the most recent Guest Room posts always appear in the sidebar. Also, the “recent comments” sidebar (and the comments RSS feed) includes comments on any and all posts, including Guest Room posts, FriendFeed/Twitter posts, etc., so it’ll be easy to follow the conversation, wherever it’s happening. Also, again, you have the option of changing your homepage view by clicking “Blog & Guest Posts” in the title bar — that’ll display my posts and guest posts in full size. Last but not least, I’ll have the ability to easily “promote” to the main homepage any guestblog posts that I particularly like.
• Becky as co-blogger: Above, I mentioned Becky as an exception to the guest-posts-to-the-Guest-Room setup. This is because Becky isn’t really a guestblogger — she’s more like a “co-blogger.” She’ll be able to post to the homepage whenever she wants, about whatever she wants, and while I’m the blog administrator (and will most likely do the bulk of the blogging), this is her blog too. She is already talking about setting up some regular features, such as Becky’s Recipe of the Week and Becky’s Home Improvement Projects, or something to that effect. I think those sorts of things will be great, as they’ll make “The Living Room Times” more homey and, well, living room-y. And if past experience is any guide, posts about everyday-life stuff are often among the most popular.
• User registration: I’ve mentioned this one already, and have a whole page about it. Some may regard this as a feature, others as a bug, but basically, I just don’t want to deal with some of the nonsense that invariably comes with allowing purely anonymous comments. It is both distressing and time-consuming to put out all the fires that erupt when trolls and a**holes have the ability to make phenomenally nasty comments without any accountability and with a limited ability to be shut down. So I’ve decided to put the kibosh on it by requiring registration. As I said before, I really hope this doesn’t have a chilling effect on the 99% of visitors whose commentary is completely “in bounds.” But either way, for my own sanity, this is something I needed to do.
On the bright side, universal user registration will make the expansion of guestblogging easier, since all I have to do, in order to promote someone from a commenter to a guestblogger, is click a single button on their WordPress profile page. Speaking of which…
• We’re back in WordPress again! After experimenting with TypePad (Irish Trojan in Tennessee), Blogger/Blogspot (Ash Blog Durbatulûk), and a variety of other options when I briefly tried to re-launch for the NCAA Tournament in March (an effort I decided to delay so I could do it right), I’ve come full circle, and am back to a self-hosted WordPress setup. This gives me vastly increased flexibility and functionality, though it opens me back up to potential disruptions in the event of high blog traffic, which is what I was trying to avoid by switching to a hosted solution in the first place. I’ve now rethought that tradeoff, which may mean occasional headaches for me, but it also means the product I’m producing will be better.
• Single-column layout, 500-pixel-wide posts: This may seem like a minor thing, and perhaps it is, but I think the lack of sidebar clutter makes the blog more accessible — and, perhaps more importantly, allows me to have somewhat wider posts, which in turn makes it easier to import photos from Flickr and have them look pretty. You’ll see what I’m talking about in a new post, titled “What you’ve missed,” that’s set to publish an hour or so after this one.
• New alternate domain name: In addition to “brendanloy.com” (the main domain) and “irishtrojan.com,” you can also now access this site at “livingroomtimes.com.”
I’m sure there’s a lot more that I’m not thinking of right now, but those are what’s coming to mind. Anyway, if you have any questions, thoughts, comments, criticisms, or technical difficulties to report, please let me know! You can comment here or e-mail me at irishtrojan [at] gmail.com.