As well as an experiment in blogging (which I will start documenting soon, I promise) I’m also using FYPA.NET as a place to experiment with how a blog can be navigated. While the “newest entries at the top” thing is one of the finest things ever, it’s not the only way. I want to try out new approaches, adapt existing ones and generally have a play with the stuff I’m throwing on this site. Because I can.
Most of these experiments will trickle in and the chances are you won’t notice them, so here’s a roundup.
The Image Grid
I’ve always liked the way Tumblr does archives and over the last few weeks I’ve been assigning a thumbnail to posts with images. Now there’s a decent chunk of them it’s time to reveal the Image Grid. Maybe in the future I’ll integrate videos and text summaries, or maybe I won’t. I quite like how it works as a filter, just picking out the graphical stuff and ignoring the rest.
Random Posts
On the sidebar you’ll find links to three posts. The next time you load a page it’ll be three different posts. It’s a little serendipity thing. Again, nothing revolutionary but nice to have.
Useful tag links
One of the things I’ve been keen to do with FYPA is really get to grips with tagging. I’ve always understood the spirit and purpose of a loose taxonomy in building archives on the fly and using them to see what’s bubbled up (the Big Tag Cloud is part of this) but as a form of site navigation they seem a little lacking. Most blogs just dump them in a long list in tiny-type, perfect for the reader to ignore. And, given the nature of ad-hoc tagging, most of the tags will be for that post only, making them kinda useless until another post gets that tag at some point in the future, maybe.
I wanted to do something about that, so I harvested a feature from the P2 theme which I remember being impressed by. Tags are still listed in full, since seeing how the blogger has tagged the post adds valuable information, but only the ones that hold 2 or more posts are highlighted, saying “there’s more stuff here”. The rest are clickable but the eye is not drawn to them, and there’s a disclaimer on the tooltip. It makes a surprising difference to an often overlooked feature.
More to come…
Still on the to-do list is Date Archives. I’ve been thinking about the utility of these a lot lately as they seem to have lost a lot of their point over the years. Does anyone ever explore a blog through the monthly archives? Can they be re-invented somehow? On FYPA I’ve been concentrating more on daily archives, which I’m very pleased with (click on the date header or the use the calendar in the sidebar) and might start looking at weekly summaries as a way to collect them (especially as some days have been drier than others, depending on my mood and/or workload). But monthly is still a mystery. A mystery that can wait, mind.
