I decided it was time to jazz up my pretty bland* template and add 'Recent comments' and scroll bars to stuff in the right hand panel, like Longrider (who only uses them right at the bottom) and Neil H.
Does this make it better organised? Vindico said they looked messy. Good, bad, indifferent?
I used 'Tips for new bloggers' (the link is under 'Statistics and stuff'), as advised by Neil H.
* This is partly intentional. I am pretty predictable and middle-of-the-road.
Elevate their cause?
11 hours ago
8 comments:
Sorry Mark - they're horrible. Having a scrollable list of "recent" posts rather defeats the point of the "recent" part, and the three nested scrollbars on your archive are truly vile.
Get rid of them - stick with clean and simple.
They certainly don't look very pretty as is. But no-one has really solved the quantity-of-content problem on blogs that I've seen anywhere.
To read blogs, I have to set Text Size to Largest. Your list on the right looks messy to me. But at least it is not the awful midden that the blessed Tim's blog has become.
Sam - I didn't like the three nested scrollbars either, they've been dissed.
Sanbikinorian - pretty they are not!
Dearime - I shall have to see if I can widen the columns and make the text bigger, esp. as I am really short sighted myself. At least I don't have white text on black background!
You could always scrap the 'recent posts' section. people can just scroll the page to see recent posts, they don't need a link panel. This would give you more space and perhaps remove the need for scroll boxes. Just a thought :-)
Vindico, good points.
I am thinking that I'll have two widgets for this. A 'recent posts' one for the last twenty posts or so, and a 'blog archive' in which I will sort things by month.
Might I suggest that you put your sitemeter at the bottom of the page, the recent comments section just below the "about me" section, followed by your "top 12 blogs". The "labels" section could go at the bottom too - if people are looking for something specific, they'll find it.
You can actually specify scrollbar colours at least for internet explorer using some simple CSS properties - by making them white you might reduce their eye-catching-ness. If I were building the site myself I'd replace them with some kind of exciting custom control that's styleable so as to recolour the scrollbars for firefox, too. But I'm not :)
They look fine to me.
Like the lavender.
Font is a bit small, but then hey, I'm over 40;)
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