The Best of BfAD
Well, vacation is now fully underway for me, and so I took this opportunity to tweak the site a little bit. There are a few small cosmetic changes, like moving the calendar down below some other items on the right-hand sidebar on the main page (I don’t think many people ever use that), and the elimination of the calendar on individual entry pages (where the calendar never functioned anyway). The main addition, however, is The Best of BfAD.
This blog has gotten so big–766 posts as of this one–that surfing the main categories sometimes leads to a hundred or more posts coming down. It becomes harder and harder to find just the topic you might be interested in. And as much as I might like to think that every word I write is riveting, I am fully aware that a person going through these posts might find less of it as armchair-gripping as I might. Searching for exactly what you want is just fine, but you have to know what to search for. So I went through all 765 existing posts and found the ones that I thought were most noteworthy–133 of them in all, or nearly one in every six. The top 25 are now listed just below the linkboard on the right-hand sidebar. At the bottom of that list is a link to the “Best Of” special page, which lists all 133, categorized and summarized in a single line each.
After looking through all the political posts, I think I could probably paste them together into a book or something; it’s hard to believe I’ve done that much essay-writing on the topic. But they do hold the basic principles of my political ideology, and a lot of important facts and views that I think people should read, particularly before this coming election.
Other categories on the “Best Of” page include Japan Information & Resources, Audio/Video Posts, and Other Popular Posts.
Enjoy!
Luis… your page doesn’t display correctly on screen resolutions less than 1280 wide. Dunno about what others use, but I prefer the higher refresh rate I can get at 1024 wide, so you might poke around with your various display options and see.
Or you might just leave it as is and figure people should be using the wider screens.
Cheers,
Paul
Actually, I think that’s Explorer’s problem. On my PC, set to 1024 wide, Explorer craps up while Mozilla displays the page great.
If you’re still using Explorer…. what’s up with you???
Switch to Mozilla or Firefox now… seriously. It’s way better, far more secure, better features, etc. etc.
Nonetheless, i will sometime soon try to figure out what Explorer’s problem is. In the entry area, between the entry text and the right-hand sidebar, do you see a big wide bluish vertical stripe?
Hi Luis,
Was just catching up on some of my feeds, and read this post. Your comment about it being hard for people to find what they are looking for struck home with me as I had just been gearing up to make it easier for people visiting my sites via search engines to find what they were looking for by highlighting search terms much as googles cache does. I had been thinking about the best way to do it, and planning it out when this article came out on A List Apart:
Enhance Usability by Highlighting Search Terms
It looks like it will give me a big headstart toward accomplishing what I wanted to, and thought it may help you out too. As soon as I have some time I will probably try to work out how best to switch all my Moveable Type pages to php and set up a redirect for pages that no longer exist in html to their php equivalents.
One thing I forgot to mention: I think the best of BfAD is a great idea but I would do it slightly differently to observe what have pretty much become blogging conventions: the recent posts being one of the first set of post links in the side bar. When I was trying to get back to this post to make sure my comment had gone in ok I first tried to find this post in the best of bfad section because I skimmed over the best of bfad section header and assumed that the best of bfad list was the recent posts list.
I would suggest one of two things to keep the best of bfad list readily available, but still have the recent posts available toward the top of the sidebar (this is afterall what avid readers will probably look for in the side nav).:
The first solution is to use javascript to change the css display status for the best of bfad list when the header is clicked. You could then have a rolldown triangle to the left of the section header and have the actual section appear when people click on the header.) I have a proof of concept exercise that I did using a similar technique to make css popup help windows that I could show you if you’d like to figure out how to do this.
The second option is to put the best of bfad section further down the sidebar, but put a named anchor on it, and probide a link at the top of the sidebar.
Hope that this is clear and helpful. Of course feel free to ignore this comment if you disagree with the idea. If you need more information though, please feel free to get in touch.
Ultrabob:I would do it slightly differently to observe what have pretty much become blogging conventions: the recent posts being one of the first set of post links in the side bar.That’s the way it was at first, but I wanted the more interesting ones at the top–otherwise, I figure that people would be less likely to go through more of them, and also the most recent ones would be too familiar to those who’ve been reading recently.When I was trying to get back to this post to make sure my comment had gone in ok I first tried to find this post in the best of bfad section because I skimmed over the best of bfad section header and assumed that the best of bfad list was the recent posts list.I don’t do a recent posts list because I already have more than a few weeks on the main page. I suppose a script with the ability to list the 10 or 20 most recent after the last one on the main page would be good, but I don’t see it as a high priority. The Best of BfAD was just my way of offering up a concentrated list of posts that I felt a lot of people might miss but which I thought might be more enjoyable or informative. In effect, going through the category or monthly archives brings forth too much chaff, and the in-blog search engine might not always bring up the most precise posts desired, or the more interesting posts. The Best-of list is more or less the edited category, a listing of the more substantive posts, with short summaries, so you don’t have to go searching or category-surfing. Well, that’s the intent, anyway…The first solution is to use javascript to change the css display status for the best of bfad list when the header is clicked. You could then have a rolldown triangle to the left of the section header and have the actual section appear when people click on the header.) I have a proof of concept exercise that I did using a similar technique to make css popup help windows that I could show you if you’d like to figure out how to do this.That would be interesting. Is the proof-of-concept available for viewing somewhere? I still haven’t figured out javascript–I’ve tried pasting in pre-made freeware scripts from time to time with very limited success–and the how-to sites I visit when I try to learn usually assume that you know a lot more than I do…
That would be interesting. Is the proof-of-concept available for viewing somewhere? I still haven’t figured out javascript–I’ve tried pasting in pre-made freeware scripts from time to time with very limited success–and the how-to sites I visit when I try to learn usually assume that you know a lot more than I do…
I didn’t have it up and available anywhere online, but I went ahead and stuck it up in its rough, proof of concept state on the Akatombo Media site. Just understand that it is currently intentionally ugly so that it would be clear if anything was overrunning boundaries. I was considering fleshing out the concept a little bit more and writing an article on it at some point, but I haven’t had time yet, and don’t have time to do anything at all with it right now. (trying to keep enough client work going to keep food on the table and all that)
In the interest of giving credit I think I originally got the idea for this from something slightly related that Zeldman wrote about (use of Javascript to modify the css display property). Anyway, without further ado, I give you Javascript and CSS pop-in windows. If you’d like to comment on it, please feel free to comment on the relevant blog post.