Blog redesign, prologue

Blog redesign is all the rage these days. Of course it always is due to the play­ful, geeky nature of the web — and blogs in par­tic­u­lar for some rea­son — but the past month seems to be just a bit more intense. Maybe it’s a vaca­tion thing; fel­low geeks think­ing they can finally work on pri­vate projects, although they should prob­a­bly get out in the sun. Maybe they do actu­ally get out­side — a lot of the redesings seem to start off a bit like I’m start­ing off now: No promises, first a lot of ini­tial blah blah…

Any­way. I won’t go into great detail on why I’m think­ing of doing another redesign, just aknowl­edge the fact that pollas.dk doesn’t even come close to what a decent blog should look and feel like in my book — and that pre­vi­ous revamps pri­mar­ily have dealt with code and silly lit­tle exper­i­ments. I’m also well aware, that although hav­ing stated sev­eral times (lat­est at webmercial’s just after blog­fo­rum) that maybe I should try to write bet­ter instead of focus­ing on turn­ing blog knobs, I’ve been a bad boy — noth­ing has hap­pened, really.

And here I am, real­iz­ing that maybe the ends meet after­all as the blog knob turn­ing just might be what I do best (how’s that for a way to make a liv­ing?): The miss­ing dis­cus­sions on the blog should be about web devel­op­ment as I intended in the first place — a redesign writeup could serve as a start­ing point.

I’m not sure I have the guts to try out the approach afore­men­tioned web­mer­cial went for last year; a live redesign with write­ups on the dif­fer­ent parts of the actual devel­op­ment (can’t find the link, sorry). I’m known to approach per­sonal web projects in a more cowboy-ish fash­ion, a lit­tle bit of code here, a server crash here, lots of “uh, it’s com­ing soon” pages etc. But I should be able to log thoughts on func­tion­al­ity and design issues, hope­fully trig­ger­ing just a lit­tle bit of comments.

My per­sonal web space is still sup­posed to be a play­ground so I won’t nesse­car­ily go for the per­fect solu­tion, the most beau­ti­ful graphic design etc. This isn’t rocket sci­ence and I’m not claim­ing to know bet­ter than any­one else — but hope­fully some­one will catch the bait and dis­cuss best uses on top­ics like syn­di­ca­tion (if that’s the right term!), meta data, graphic design, com­ments, cat­e­gories, var­i­ous forms of inte­grat­ing side– and moblogs etc etc.

I have no idea what­so­ever on the whens and the hows, but I’ll try and get off my ass and con­vert my wire­frame scrib­bles into some­thing dig­i­tal and read­able and post the thoughts on func­tion­al­ity I have so far. I have a feel­ing I don’t have time for this at all, but a lot of the ‘work’ is already there and I need a project not directly work related. There’s just too much real work…

While doing that, I’ll try and think of ways of break­ing the process into sen­si­ble bits, allow­ing for a decent mix­ture of dis­cus­sion and actual development.