A Personal Miscellany

Music and culture, mostly.

1. Justin 25.02.07 / 11am

   I’m not convinced. It feels a little too empty on the homepage. I also enjoyed the ability to quickly scroll through older posts, and of course the images were all embedded there for us to see as we went down skimreading.

   Perhaps this won’t affect current readers who have already seen older content, but for attracting new readers, I think its potentially offputting. You can’t see more than one article at a time, so going through content now feels more laborious.
2. 11V 25.02.07 / 3pm

   I agree with you Justin. If I had the brainpower and time to recode this template, I’d be very happy as I think the content pages are rather gorgeous. However, the homepage (which I think is similarly lovely) is as you say impractical. It’s as though the designers have thrown out the baby with the bathwater in trying to rethink the format/structure of how a blog might work. Sigh.
3. themilkman 26.02.07 / 12pm

   On a purely visual aspect, I like the very clean lines and modern feel on both templates (home page and content), and the fact that there’s a lot of space. I am currently re designing my portfolio (hence the lack of updates on the blog of late) and I am going for a bit of a similar feel.

   I don’t however think that either templates are very user-friendly to be perfectly honest. I was struggling to get back to the home page for this post earlier. I was expecting to be able to click on the logo to get back to it, but it didn’t work and there was no link around the post itself to allow you to get back to the home page. Having all the recent posts at the bottom didn’t quite seem logical to me. Maybe you could try to the About / Recently / Categories section at the top, although it might not look as good.

   All in all, I am not too sure about the great usability of this theme, and, as Justin pointed out, although it won’t put current readers off, it might deter some new readers.
4. themilkman 26.02.07 / 12pm

   In fact, as an add-on to my last post, after navigating from post to post in the last couple of minutes, I have discovered that, unless I am being either totally blind of stupid, it is currently impossible to get back to the home page once you’ve clicked on a post, which is quite frustrating.
5. Peter Skwiot Smith 26.02.07 / 6pm

   I pretty much have to agree with everything that has been said. When I look at the site, I’m not sure what is content and what isn’t (ie: links, etc).

   Big ups on changing things (even though I had no problems with the old site), but I’d recommend finding a different theme to apply. They are a pain to edit, but it might be worth it…
6. 11V 26.02.07 / 6pm

   Bruno – if you click the title ‘A Personal Miscellany’ at the top of the page you get back to the homepage, however, the link seems sometimes to be a bit fiddly. Which is not good at all.

   Gah! I love this template. I hate this template! I wish I had the time to sort it out. I’ve tried quite a few others and this is still my favourite. I will see if I can restructure it so the homepage is a more traditional, sequential run of recent posts, but the sub-pages stay like this.

   As to getting more people to read this blog, I’d love that, but as it’s not focused upon a particular subject I suspect I’ll never get many readers/commenters. I’m also focusing a lot of my (very small amount of) spare time on my other blog, Music Interfaces.

   Apologies to you all for the disruption, I will sort it out. I’d also recommend subscribing to my RSS feed (link at the bottom of every page).
7. themilkman 26.02.07 / 11pm

   Hey, I must have been coming at a time when the link at the top just decided it was not going to work. My first reaction was to click on it, but it just wouldn’t work. I was on Firefox on OSX 10.4 if this helps. I know you work on Macs so I’m sure you’d have picked up on this if it was just due to the browser/computer combination, and you’re aware that it is flakey anyway. If only these templates were easy to get your head round to.

   Good luck with the changes. As I said, on a purely aesthetic level, I like this template a lot.
8. Christopher Layne 05.03.07 / 8am

   I think it looks fine and is just minimal enough. But the contrast doesn’t seem to be high enough overall (literal contrast).
9. 11V 05.03.07 / 7pm

   Thanks Christopher. Contrast looks decent on my MacBook Pro screen at home and my PC monitor at work. What are you looking at it on? I might need to tweak the stylesheet.

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