ON MORE DESIGN CHANGES ON THIS BLOG

BACK TO BASICS

Another housekeeping post I'm afraid, so soon after the last one a few days ago.  The catalyst for the changes include the device pictured on the left, and my wife.  More on that shortly. 

I've made these new changes to the layout of the blog that hopefully will be a net benefit to readers both on a PC and on cellphones/PDAs.

1.  First up, you'll notice that the FeedFlare features by Feedburner I implemented a few days ago, are gone for now.  FeedFlare made it possible to have a number of convenient tags at the end of every post that allow a reader to take quick action on an individual post, like my favorite:  emailing a given post to somebody.

However, as I explained in my previous post, this requires converting from Typepad's standard templates to "Advanced templates".  That involves a fair bit of HTML programming every time one needs to make design/layout changes to the blog, like the ones I'll describe shortly. 

Not having the time to devote to that, I've reverted back to Typepad's standard templates, thus losing FeedFlare for the time being.  I'll have to wait until Six Apart/Typepad, the hosting service for this blog, to offer FeedFlare or a feature like it, using the standard templates and quick "check" buttons.

2.  The key design change however, is moving most of the items in the first of the three columns used in the current standard template of the blog.  This means there are only three items for now in the first column, followed by the daily posts in the second column, which in turn are followed by a whole list of items in the third column. 

Still with me? Good.

3.  The first advantage of this is that the site hopefully loads a lot quicker on a PC (or a Mac), especially with the post for the day.  The third column generally takes the longest to load and the current design hopefully allows the reader to quickly start on the post of the day while the other stuff loads.

4.  The second advantage, and the request that triggered all these changes this Sunday, is that the site now loads the latest post much quicker on cell phones, hand-helds and PDAs.

These devices typically load a blog column by column, which means the if the first column in a blog is lengthy, it takes a whole bunch of scrolling down to get to the first post.

This was noticed by my wife this morning as she put her newly acquired Blackberry 7130 from Verizon Wireless, with high-speed EV-DO wireless to the test.  It's the same gadget I've long used as my primary cell phone and email device (Recommended).

Loading my blog, she was instantly frustrated by the afore-mentioned endless scrolling. 

She suggested switching the columns, which was one of those first "Duh" moments for me today (as in "why the heck didn't I think of that??").

Thus this cascade of changes in the design of the post.

Hope you all agree that the changes are a net benefit.

As always, comments and feedback are always welcome.

Comments

[Jason Wood]

Michael,

I too raced to add FeedFlare upon the SixApart/Feedburner news only to quickly reverse course for the exact reasons you cite. The good news is Nick, the integration engineer involved with the project, commented on my blog that FeedFlare integration is coming in the next release (no word on when that is, however).

http://woodrow.typepad.com/the_ponderings_of_woodrow/2006/06/feedburnertypep.html

Also, re: your formatting to better handle mobile devices. I hadn't thought of that until a few weeks ago, at a dinner with some SAP folks, one of them tried to pull my blog up on his Treo and had difficult reading it. Your idea of reformatting is something I'll need to look into; well done.

Jason

[Michael Parekh]

thanks for your comment, Jason...that's good to here that the Typepad folks are working on the Feedflare integration.

At the very least, they should provide an "email this" option at the end of every post. Even my wife, who is as mainstream as one can get in terms of blogging and stuff, got the utility of that.

On the PDA front, minimizing the left column of the blog seems to help a ton in improving the readability of the blog on a small device.

Not to mention that it seems to load a lot faster too.

It's easy to add a ton of bling into the sidebars over time on a blog until you realize that each one need to load via different servers everytime the blog is called up.

I've often sat waiting for a blog to open (mine or someone else's), and noticed that the hang up seems to be not Typepad, but some third-party service called up by a sidebar item.

Thanks again,

michael

[Emil Sotirov]

Michael - would you consider changing your post titles to normal capitalization?

[Tom Burka]

Here's an alternative suggestion: Why does the software for internet surfing on cells not allow you to jump from to column to column (instead of, say, hitting a particular button three hundred times to move to the bottom of one column and the top of the next)? I read tons of blogs -- and the only way to do that using the 7130 is to bookmark a web page for PDA link -- those that have them (mine does).

Doesn't it make sense to alter the software so that it can be used to view the available content instead of altering all of the pages on the web to suit the software?