cre8d design

Six Apart’s Mena Trott was recently interviewed by Business Week online. Six Apart is working on Project Comet (beta-launching soon) for the “new generation of blogs”.

Mena believes the next big issues in blog design are:

• Select and filtered readership – different people want different views of the blog, something I touched on recently. “A big issue right now is how to take that idea in account when designing blogs”.
• Keeping blogs uncluttered when more and more assets are added to the blog. (Amen!)
• Discovering which template designs appeals to the largest number of people. Designing simple and bare-bones templates where you can focus on content and context.

I’ve been thinking more about blog layouts and whether or not new layouts improve things for readers.

In terms of this blog, would this layout be a more useful and helpful way to organise my blog posts:

I’d categorise my posts into three broad categories (and use tagging for the specifics): blog design (the main focus of this blog), other (technology) interests (Web 2.0, Ruby on Rails, AJAX) and my life (travel, photography, music). I have friends who want to hear about how my life is going and while I could continue on with my old blog, it’s helpful to let people know when I’m away on holiday or what I’m up to here too. Content would be organised a little like newspaper columns – I have my favourite columnists which I turn to first before glancing through the rest of the paper. Some have suggested having different pages for this – although without a front page which entices you to read this extra content, it might be easily overlooked. I give emphasis to the main focus of the blog by giving it the widest column, older posts aren’t lost in the mix so quickly and my content is more focussed.

Of course, categories provide us with these pages already – so people who’re interested in just reading about my life could just go to that page. But what if we saw category archives as more than archives, but rather like main sections of a newspaper – something we want to turn over to see, rather than old stuff that there’s just too much of to catch up on? By linking at the bottom of each of these columns to the appropriate category archive, we invite the reader to see more articles and stories like the ones they’ve just been reading.

So, would this layout be more helpful to you? Of course, if you’re a feed-reader, the corresponding question would be, would you prefer there were four main feeds for this blog (all posts, blog design, other interests, life)? (Yes, I know WordPress has created all of these already, but making them more obvious to everyone helps.)

While I’m thinking aloud, many times I’m at a blog and I wish I could quickly hide blog post categories which didn’t interest me. We spend so much time tagging things but do we use them as filters, rather than discovery tools? Would our blog/feed reading be more efficient if we filtered on tags which were relevant to us?

Recently I created an OPML listing of TechCrunch’s product index. I’ve seen people talking about OPML before, and noticed it on some blogs but some things just escape your attention until you have a need for learning about it or using it.

What is OPML?
It’s an XML format for list outlines.

How does it relate to blogging?
It comes in handy when you’d like to export/import all the feeds you subscribe to (i.e. a list of feeds). People are sharing their OPML files so others can quickly subscribe to all the blogs someone else is subscribed to – and their “reading list” will be updated automatically when the owner adds/deletes feeds. You can also display the list on your blog and expand it out like a tree-structure to hunt for things you’re interested in, e.g. this directory.

Why the title “fumbling my way around OPML”?
Perhaps I don’t get it, but I’ve found that learning about OPML has been rather confusing and I don’t think it needed to be. I didn’t find the official OPML site to be user-friendly or informative. I figured I should download the OPML editor if I was going to be creating an OPML file. Again, I found that site really hard to follow. I eventually found some help on creating a reading list. Strangely, I had to update the software in order to be able to do this. Once updated, I thought it’d all be simple : just add in my feeds to go on my reading list and voila. Well, not quite. Everything seemed so non-intuitive and confusing in OPML editor. The documentation suggested validating your OPML file to see if everything’s working ok. My first reading list didn’t validate. There was all sorts of code that the OPML editor had added in itself which weren’t valid. Very weird. So I decided to approach this differently: scrap the OPML editor and code the OPML file myself, by looking at some examples. I meshed in some PHP code to loop through all the tag’s RSS feeds I was using and this time, everything validated perfectly.

I was left wondering: why isn’t there a quick template for creating a reading list?

Something like this:


<opml version="1.1">
<head>
<title>The Reading List Title</title>
<dateCreated>Mon, 23 Jan 2006 07:30:40 GMT</dateCreated>
<dateModified>Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:50:13 GMT</dateModified>
<ownerName>Author</ownerName>
<ownerEmail>author@email.com</ownerEmail>
<expansionState/>
<vertScrollState>1</vertScrollState>
</head>
<body>
<outline text="Section heading"/>
<outline text="Text" title="Title"" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://www.thefeedurl.com/rss/"/>
<body>
</opml>


… where details would be swapped out for the real ones, and more sections/feed lines added in as necessary.

Have I missed something important? OPML seems a really simple and powerful tool but I have found the path so way to be incredily muddled and very geek-speak.

I’ve had this post in my drafts pile for some time and have been trying to learn more about OPML, in case I’m just way off here and missing the point. I’ve been quietly following Anne Zelenka’s posts on OPML and had been thinking to myself that it must just be me that doesn’t get it. But then today, she posted this:

I think I may display a whole lot of cluelessness in this post…I’ve played around a bit with the OPML Editor, and I can’t say I’ve accomplished much or even enjoyed it. I find it frustrating to use a tool that keeps me away from the code (i.e., the OPML) itself. I don’t fully understand its architecture–it seems to be written in C using something called the Frontier kernel. Perhaps I just need to spend more time with it. I plan to watch Lisa Williams’ video on building a reading list with it. Hey look! She put in a bunch of mom blogs. Thank you, Lisa. Seems I’m not the only one who sees more to the Web than tech, politics, and celebrity gossip.

I breathed a sigh of relief and felt safe to post my frustrations with OPML documentation and OPML editor. I hope that OPML moves out of the realm of geeks and becomes a useful tool for others.

…I still wonder what the OPML editor does exactly…and why I would need it.

Just got back from having an awesome holiday hiking down in Abel Tasman National Park – see my Flickrset for snapshots. (more…)