Lunch with Sheliegh

Just had another fascinating lunch with Sheliegh (and this time, my credit card worked, much to my relief) which involved some scrumptious drinks and an even more scrumptious chocolate dessert (something in-between fudge and ice cream, sun-dried cherries, cream sauce, almonds, and chocolate syrup… drooool)

Among many other things, we briefly talked about some blog stuff, so I thought I would capture some of the ideas (many of which involved food comparisons, appropriately enough:

• include ability to switch cronology
• “Curious readers need to directly engage the blog producer in a way that draws the attention of other readers [so that there can be a multi-way conversation on older posts/topics].”
• ongoing topic list
• question intake – sometimes a curious reader has a question that does not necessarily “fit” in any current posting… would be nice to capture that and encourage interaction
• Deconstruct the site (a la Tuffte)..0. screenshot with arrows describing components, trackback, personal conventions
• Mindmaps – final version is white bread, previous iterations are wheat… things can be learned by seeing the process of development
• Pie chart of my time instead of numerical email counts, etc
• get user feedback on which widgets and doo-dads are actually interesting and useful
• visually represent categories/areas as decaying or old (a la Apple piles or crufty documents)
• main articles are the meat, the superficial list of urls and news articles and non-substantial links are the “Cheese sandwich”
• When I started my blog, the robot show was the Steak, and the blog was supposed to be a side dish… a supporting character. Now, it’s the sugar/sparkly candy… quick fix. It’s stolen the limelight

Fix 05.23.03 18:03: changed an “authors” to “readers”