I’ve finally gotten around to rearranging my blog layout!

For a long time the old one was bothering me. For one, in a large maximized window, a huge empty white gap would open up in the middle. I also disliked the typeface for the title (which I kinda picked halfheartedly… which I’m told you should never do if you’re any bit serious about design. Oops. =)). Lastly, the repeating halftone dot pattern on the left side wasn’t perfectly lined up (barely noticeable but it bothered me nonetheless).

In this iteration, one of my goals was to make some room for additional informational/navigational elements. But I wanted to maintain the basic idea of the old one, which was that this should be as basic and simple as a blog could get, stripped down to little more than entries + a tag cloud as a primary means of navigation.

I tend to find many personal blogs nowadays a little bloated, with all their sidebar elements and widgets and dingdongs. Some of them are genuinely useful but most of them, I feel, are extraneous and merely clog up the page visually. You don’t really need a listing of archives AND a calendar AND a listing of categories AND a tag cloud. Sometimes a calendar is useful if you have a lot of entries, but I blog like once a week, so you could pretty much see a whole month at a time just by clicking “previous” or “next entries.” I also don’t feel that it is necessary for me to include huge long lists of links, blogrolls, etc. in a sidebar which is present on each and every page as part of the layout. I feel that this content, if necessary, would fit better on a separate page, away from the entries which should be the focus of the blog. I know some people do link lists to allow pingbacks to work, but for the time being, I am content to not have pingbacks. (Maybe sometime in the future, I might make a separate page listing off all the random, diverse blogs I read… but again I don’t think such lists need to be ubiquitously present, as part of a sidebar.)

That said, for the purposes of my blog, I think the most important thing to include is a tag cloud. Tagging is seriously one of the best inventions since sliced… almonds. It gives out so much information – the topic(s) that the blogger cares about, the frequency of posts in each topic – and also doubles as navigation and an organizational tool. It’s dynamically generated and plus it just looks cool. If I had my way every blog would just be entries, a tag cloud, and maybe a search bar. =)

But the blogoworld is not as simple as I would have it and I realized the need for some other things, which is the 2nd motivation for this redesign. I added a footer that contains a couple things normally found in sidebars. I wanted a place to give some info about this blog, add a search form, and to link to some of my friends’ blogs. I know I just said that link-lists are techincally extraneous but I make a special exception for friends, because the primary purpose of my blog is to keep in touch with people anyhow. In that sense, I need ready access to their worlds.

There you have it… Kaffehausdekadenzmoderne v2.