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columnar adjustments
Spent a good chunk of time this morning at the Golden Nugget Pancake House, with CJO, discussing changes I might make to this blog.
The issue: over the past couple of months, I've been spending more and more time working on the reviews in the sidebar. Because of the usual issues with the complicated allocation of love and resources on the physical plane*, this forces me to neglect this here main column: often I'll say to myself I'm going to work on my blog and I'll spend an evening just tweaking the sidebar. This is all well and good as far as it goes, but my instinctual feeling is that when people pop over to this page to check for updates, they glance at the top post here in the main column, and if there's no new post they conclude that there's probably no fresh info-matter anywhere on the blog.
The easy solution, I guess, is to take the book reviews and record reviews out of the sidebar, and just post them here in the main column, which is where they began. But CJO rightfully pointed out that there are merits to keeping material aggregated by topic: people who come to Raccoon primarily to look over record reviews probably enjoy being able to quick look at the block of reviews over there in the sidebar, and not have to sift through a dozen posts on narrative or context or taxonomies or any of the other popular Raccoon topics in order to find them. And there are probably people who come here for the stuff on narrative, etc. and are glad to see the music stuff relegated over to the sidebar.
So, readers, I ask you: should I err in favor of a more eclectic main column? Would any of you miss the current, "content-rich" sidebar? (Fans of aggregation, please note that you can always consult the audio and book roundup pages.) What areas of this site do you check out the most? Why do you even visit here in the first place? Besides my winning personality, I mean.
These questions link into larger questions I have about Web readership, about how we browse weblogs in general, about whether it's preferable to have one eclectic weblog that's updated frequently or a set of smaller ones that are focused on more narrow sets of interests, etc.
*- "the complicated allocation of love and resources on the physical plane," a wonderful phrase of no small utility, comes to you courtesy Khaela Maricich, aka The Blow. |
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
10:24 PM
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