Enjoy the Holidays, dear readers, whether you celebrate Christmas, or do something else. Just enjoy them, and try not to work. Taking a break from blogging is important.
Which I’m doing, including a trip to Milan, Italy.
So Happy Holiday’s to you all! We’ll be back again on January 7th-ish.
I just published a post on Devlounge, titled Break Your Design Mold. It’s about designers being too stuck in that familiar rot, walking paved roads of easy solutions that work, rather than trying the path in the forest of tough decisions on the edge of things.
Enough with the analogies, go read the post. It could just as well be a Wisdump update, so you’ll just have to do.
Now if you excuse me, I’ll have to go continue breaking that mold of mine…
Microblogging is cool, with Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, and Pownce, among others. The latter now have added a mobile interface, apparently not really meant to go online already, but I tried it out, of course.
Before we get to the video, I’d just like to say that I enjoy Pownce a lot. I’m even a pro user. It’s not the place for everyone, but I’ve found interesting people there, made connections, and so on. I guess you could do the same on Facebook or Twitter, but it haven’t worked nearly as well for me as Pownce has.
If you haven’t checked it out do say hi, I’m at pownce.com/tdh. Give a shout in the comments if you need an invite, although they are rarely hard to come by.
You see those arrows there, in the Google Adsense ad? They let you browse ads, within the ad, so if you don’t like what you’re seeing you can just go ahead and scroll up and down within the ad. You might or you might not see these ads in the sidebar here, and not all ads get the arrows, but if you’re not then I videotaped it for you, with my two cents on the matter.
Cranky? I guess so.
So you’ve decided to run multiple blogs after all. Good for you, as long as you’re contributing (or making a truckload of cash) then it’s fine. Or why not just hire someone to blog for you, that always works, right?
Time to install 35 WordPress blogs! Even if that 5 minute install was all that was needed, it would be around 3 hours of work, and that’s not counting setting up your databases, uploading WordPress files, and so on. Then you’ve got your average plugins, API keys to paste into Akismet’s settings, activating the right theme, fixing the permalinks…
So we’ve cleaned up our listings, and our posts are already a lot prettier with images, right? Good.
Now what?
Well, if you’re the kind of person who writes looong blog posts, then you could make them easier to handle with some stylish headings.
Now, before we move on with this you need to figure out something about your theme’s structure. If the author knows his stuff, I’d say he’s got the logo in a h1 tag, and the post title in a h2 tag - but not all swear to this, so make sure.
This means your headings in posts would be h3 tags.
I’ve been thinking a lot on whether it’s a good idea as a publisher to focus on several smaller blogs, or try to build a real power house. In my opinion, it’s not an obvious choice for someone that wants in the new media publishing sphere.
On one hand, having a bunch of smaller blogs means that you can cross-link and -promote to launch new projects, as well as drive traffic from one blog to neighboring niches. That’s a good thing, and what blog networks such as b5media does.
With all the sidebar (and footer) bashing I’ve been doing lately, I thought I’d share a nice sidebar design with you, and tell you why I like it.
Enter Blog Perfume, which has a decent design overall, clean and sober, yet modern and with things happening. I’m no fan of the header, the background makes it a bit too busy, but other than that it’s nice enough. Also, the search bar needs to pop more.
And the sidebar is great.
On top, the subscribe graphic, precisely where you expect it to be.
Under that, a nice two column categories menu, with a separate background plate to really stand out. It works well with the Feedburner flame in the subscribe graphic above, very nice.
Two ads follows. I see them, they don’t annoy me.
Then the sidebar gets a little more anonymous, something I think is on purpose. Light grey boxes for popular posts and recent comments (which has an overuse of bold type, unfortunately) offer deep linking to the readers, and they do it in a sober and clean manner.
Finally, there’s a bigger square ad at the bottom. I think it’s OK to end the sidebar with a bigger ad, I have no problems with that. On this particular occasion, all ads fitted the layout nicely as well.
Watch and learn, people. No crappy widgets, just clean functionality for the readers, and the necessary ads. A good utilization of the sidebar.
The blogosphere could be a lot prettier if bloggers just utilized the included options in their blog software, and in their themes. I’ve spoken about ugly listings and what to do to make them more pretty, now it’s time for images.
In my opinion, images are great for making longer blog post seem more attractive. You can use them to lighten a post, illustrate a point, or just capture the reader’s eye.
Take Wisdump for example. While the design of the current version is far from optimal, it utilizes images for just about every post, and makes sure to display them in the listing. This is of course to make you see the post, the eye goes for the image rather than the text, and hopefully this will spark your interest.
