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Weblog Improvements
02:39AM CST February 23, 2004

We endeavored this morning to render an ordered list of desired changes to this weblog as part of our ongoing redesign-cum-restructuring, and could find no compelling reason (other than the absolute vanity involved, of course) to not make such a list public. We'll update this list as it (inevitably) grows. The list:

  1. A useful 404 error document. This is currently our most egregious usability violation. This document should include, at a minimum, links to recent posts.
  2. Archive restructuring. Nobody reads monthly archive pages. We need a complete archive page that lists all available posts. Monthly archive pages can stay, but should be used primarily as a tool to find individual pages, not as a record of the full post. All this is an attempt to eliminate redundancy and drive users to individual archives.
  3. More useful metadata. Archive pages should include valuable information that assists in finding individual posts. For example, monthly archive pages should show a list of posts organized by citation and topics-covered. Our weblogging software doesn't support categories, but, since this is a technical weblog, we can get a lot of mileage out of organizing posts by technologies mentioned. We use abbr and acronym religiously. We should be exploiting these elements to create a posts-by-abbreviations feature similar to Mark Pilgrim's posts-by-citation. We'd rather include this information within archive pages, instead of on a separate page, as Mark has done.
  4. Print CSS file. Frankly, we doubt anyone is printing our entries, but we'd like to make an effort to generate a useful print stylesheet.

We're happy to be the ten-billionth person to cite Dunstan Orchard's blog as a wonderful source of inspiration. Dunstan's doing more to make his blog beautiful and usable than nearly anybody else we read regularly. To wit: the best, most friendly weblog error-handling we've ever seen; extremely useful "blogged people" and "blogged domains" features (more info); an elegant, innovative tabbed menu interface; a complete and intuitive archiving scheme; and most distinctively, a dynamically-generated, ninety-image header panorama, which, as Dunstan describes, "depict[s] the same scene under a different weather condition, time of day, and (at night) phase of the moon" according to current conditions. Dunstan's raised the bar.

There's probably more to come. Let us know what we should be doing better.