As you’ll undoubtedly notice, I’ve made some major blog layout changes. I’m not in love with the return of the three-column layout, but I’ve concluded it’s a necessary evil, so that I can keep tweets on the homepage — thus keeping the site fresh when I’m not blogging much — while preventing them from overrunning the main body of the blog, as has been happening with increasing frequency. Bonus: this will help facilitate the auto-importing of Becky’s tweets — coming soon! [UPDATE: Becky auto tweet import now up & running!]
The whole direct tweet-to-blog thing has always been an uneasy and imperfect arrangement, all the moreso as I’ve become a more prolific tweeter. I find that concerns about an overrun homepage constantly affect both the way I tweet (there have been way too many tweets lately containing the characters *# — that prevents them from posting to the blog) and the way I blog. So I want to try something different. And I think I have the leeway to do so, since I see from my stats that 1024×768 is pretty much the minimum screen resolution of my blog audience, so expanding the page width from 835px to 985px hopefully won’t pose too much of a problem.
Anyway. bottom line, all of my tweets (and soon, Becky’s) will appear in the sidebar at right. A handful of selected tweets will occasionally appear in the main body of the blog, when I choose to emphasize them, along with FriendFeed links. (There’s more there right now than there will usually be, because we’re in a transitional phase.)
I’ll have more to say later, probably. For now, I’m still doing a lot of tinkering — this is definitely a work in progress. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.
Good move – I like it.
I much prefer a two column layout. Three columns is too busy in my opinion. My suggestion would be to have a Tweet sub-page people can check out from which you could promote specifically newsworthy Tweets, but then its your blog so you pretty much get to do what you want.
What I would like to ultimately do is create an alternate two-column version of the homepage which would basically be what you’re describing, so users can choose which version they want to bookmark & use regularly. But while I don’t disagree with you about the “busy” problem, I also don’t want to bury the tweets on a page where I know 95% of readers will never see them. That defeats the purpose of having them here to keep the page fresh and give readers something to comment on. So the default setting needs to be the one with the tweets on the homepage, and then hopefully I can offer a two-column alternative for those whose heads threaten to asplode due to this layout 🙂
I like the layout.
(grin) So the 3 column (which *I* like, too) seems to be a conservative layout …
Much better to my eyes…
I like that we can still comment on the tweets in the separate column.
Also, please note this day as being the first in which kcatnd, Alasdair, and gahrie all agree on something. I make no claim to holding any of their political views, however!
At least David still disagrees with Alasdair and gahrie, otherwise the space-time continuum would have imploded by now. 🙂
My opposition is more parochial: I catch up on your blog most frequently from my blackberry, and the three-column solution mangles the blackberry view quite badly. That, and I believe a world without Twitter is a better world overall. 😉
Btw, when I saw this post’s headline while reading my blackberry on the throne this morning, I totally thought this post was going to be an announcement that Becky was preggers with Loyakami. 😉
Might I suggest trying to get on this Alpha?
http://tweetboard.com/alpha/
Though I think Brendan knows every time he discusses the design of the blog I complain about it being far too cluttered.
And Andrew brings up a good point, the three columns is difficult to deal with on any mobile device.
Or as I try very hard and very patiently to explain to my clients, if you try and emphasize everything you emphasize nothing.
So you need to think about what is really important on the home page. I’m not saying you should necessarily change anything. But you do need to ask yourself these sorts of questions:
I know this is kind of blunt, but… I’m not sure when the last time I looked at any of the blogroll stuff on the side bar, save today, to notice that I might want to ask the question, why is it there? Is there a better way to handle this kind of information, or that there are a number of sites you want to highlight. Perhaps through a shorter linked list that goes back to these sites as they have interesting things to link to. It would likely be noticed more than a rather anonymous sidebar link that’s easy to miss completely.
March Madness ended months ago, why is that still up? And come to that, didn’t you but the stay tuned block up back when you launched the new site? I think you can take that down.
You have two about blocks, could you do with one that expands when you click or mouse over it instead?
There is a lot of extra stuff with the become a fan on Facebook, perhaps just a “like living room times” button.
Recent comments is very useful, especially to the regulars, but you have it very heavily redacted making it hard to skim the comments. Perhaps we can come up with a way to get better access to this information.
And the countdowns, don’t get me wrong, they are kind of cool, but they get lost in the noise. What if you had a bigger countdown box, perhaps even in the header, but it only shows one, say what’s coming up soonest or whatever one you want to highlight. Then when you mouse over it it shows you all the countdowns, or gives you more info about the thing?
The point isn’t that you necessarily do all, or any of this. The point is to think about what you’ve got going on on your home page, and make sure all of it is important. Because if you keep trying to make everything important, it gets harder and harder to find anything. I know you’ll never go as simple as something like daringfireball.net and you shouldn’t it’s not the Brendan Loy brand, it doesn’t fit you or how you do things. But it also takes a team of full time people to keep the home page of nytimes.com manageable.
As it is, it’s a bit distracting trying to read stuff now. I agree it’s time for some adjustments to things, but I’m not sure this is the answer.
Heh. Well, first of all, you’re right about the “stay tuned” and the blogroll. Those could certainly go on my (empty) “Links” page. The NCAA & NIT Pools are only still there because they’re my reminder to send the winners their damn t-shirts … so really I should just do that, then I can remove that. The RSS stuff could go below the tweets, and the “About the Authors” (perhaps slightly shortened) above the tweets. “Above the Blog” can probably disappear entirely, or be merged into “About the Authors.” That leaves Recent Comments and Countdowns, which are really the lynchpins of that left sidebar. The obvious solution would be to create a separate “Comments” page, which is already a requested feature, and which I’ve done in the past with some sort of hack — it’s surprisingly hard to figure out how to do that with WordPress, but I know it can be done. And then I can figure out what to do with the Countdowns, I certainly wouldn’t keep the left sidebar around if they’re the only reason to do so.
The problem is finding the time to make all those changes.
Recent comments on its own page, countdowns right below the about on the right side, followed by your twits, errrr tweets, then the RSS feeds.
While I realize you’ll disagree, I don’t want the tweets that far down — they are the most dynamic part of the page. If anything, I would be reluctant to put the “about” box above them. I certainly wouldn’t put the (totally static) “about” box AND the (mostly static) “countdown” box above them.
Also: I signed up for that alpha thingy dcl mentioned. I might try it out. But I like having the tweets — and comments on the tweets — be incorporated into the blog itself, so as to keep the blog (and its comment section) flowing with new content. So I’m skeptical about that as a long term solution.
The trouble I see with incorporating the entire twitter stream as I see it is that it moves content down the side pretty fast. A day or two and its gone completely, and a lot of it while sometimes briefly amusing isn’t likely to garner much in the way of comments like main blog posts will.
I’ve got it! You can have the tweets scroll across the top or bottom of the homepage like a news ticker! That way when i’m reading your blog it can be just like CNN or ESPN 🙂
The problem is finding the time to make all those changes.
I have an idea: USE TWITTER LESS! 😛