Sheesh. Can't a guy take a couple of days off without people breaking into hives? "Days off," as in working on other things. But amongst them... Rethinking the design of the site, in a fairly fundamental way. I have two, seemingly contradictory aims in mind. One, to make the page cleaner, easier to comprehend and nicer to look at -- and, importantly, faster to load. Much faster. Two, to integrate the site's various functions more tightly, allowing faster access to more information: ideally, by bringing it all onto the same page. How to reduce clutter and yet increase content? By intelligent site architecture. By ingenious use of sophisticated navigational devices. By hiring someone else to do it. I've got a long-suffering web-wizard working on it as we speak: someone who knows java and perl and PHP, whoever they are. Oh, and Movable Type: the Mercedes of blogging engines (which makes Blogger, I don't know, the Honda Civic?), with its elegant layout, plug-ins and endless ability to shuffle and reshuffle blog entries according to various criteria: by day, by week, by category, by number of comments, etc. So big changes in the works. To give you an idea of what I have in mind, have a look at this. Now don't worry: it's not going to look anything like that when we're done. This is just a dressmakers' dummy, a crude working model intended only to illustrate the schematics of the thing. And no, we're not going to use frames, where we can avoid it. I told you: this guy knows about this stuff. It begins by analyzing the site into its three core functions: a blog, complete with archives and reader comments ("the blog"); a searchable, browsable compendium of my published works ("the works"); and a usable list of external links ("the links"), presented in such a way that the reader can browse through them -- or just look up a reference -- without having to leave the site. So each gets a page -- or rather a tab, opening into the same page. If we do it right, it will be instantaneous and seamless. We're going to move a lot of the links that are currently sprayed all over the main page a) to a single place on the page (probably the left sidebar), though b) not necessarily on the same page. Some will be tucked away on the "works" or "links" pages: just one (or maybe two) clicks away. And we're going to make liberal use of collapsible headings, which you can open or close at your leisure, to tidy these up further (again, not in the crude way I've used to mimic it in the illustrative model, but in some mysterious way using java, or PHP, or whatever it is). Anyway, poke around, tell me what you think. And to let you know what I'd like the finished product to look like, here's a bunch of pages whose design I like, whether for logistical elegance or clean look or both: http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/ http://www.andybudd.com/ http://stopdesign.com/ http://veen.com/jeff/ http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/ http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/styles/sample.php?wpstyle=rubric http://telerana.f2o.org/index.html http://www.whatdoiknow.org/ http://www.simplebits.com/ http://kottke.org/ http://diveintomark.org/ http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/ http://superfluousbanter.org/ http://www.airbag.ca/ http://www.zeldman.com/ http://www.alistapart.com/ http://www.1976design.com/blog/ http://www.lightpierce.com/ltshdw/ http://www.happycog.com/ http://photomatt.net/ http://www.electablog.com/ http://www.wonkette.com/ There you are. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll be back to blogging shortly.