Bear in mind: I’m trying out ideas here. This is a collection of ideas for future use rather than the coherent presentation of suggested page arrangment, language, and function. Also: this is the main page of the blog, not the “Construction News” category archive.

A “Construction News” banner graphic does appear on this page, though. It’s just a punt: I want the page banner content independent of the page <title> tag. Of course, I could do this with text, but I felt graphic today. Notice also that the content is now centered, and (if you notice such things) that all page main divs (”banner,” “content” and “links”) are now held by an uber-div, “frame.”

The items in all category archives are repeated 5 times. Try it. Click on “Construction Updates” in the “Entries by Category” section (on the right, down a bit), take a look and then come back here. This happens because I can’t get an extension to work, but I’m waiting for help with this. This is not right, and the blog will not behave like this when it’s released.

There’s also a new nav bar just under the banner. Most of the links don’t go anywhere, but it’s a navigation tool that we might consider using.

This current incarnation of the blog looks OK using Firebird 0.7, Netscape 7.1 and IE6, but who knows what it will look like under IE5x & others, or in Mac browsers. I’ll have to check. The colums might weird out in IE5x; if they do, it’s time for the box model hack.

Next jobs: 1.) Create full-text RSS feeds. 2.) Figure out how to make per-category templates, searches, etc.

Once these things are done, and we decide on looks, we’ll be ready for prime time. At least, we’ll be ready to run it by marketing.

Troy brought up a good point: if we want to keep users away from the main blog page (the page that contains all posts from all categories) we’re going to have to hide it from search engines. We’re also going to have to hide it from reasonably capable and curious users: the URL is not hard to guess, since it’s the root of the category archive pages. So we’ll move the “main” blog page aside (instead of “index.html” we’ll name it something else) and then use the index file as a kind of user-oriented magazine rack.
But can we hide a page from the Google-searching public? MezzoBlue suggests not in the article In the Referrals.

I was concerned about searches, since we’re treating category archives as stand-alone blogs. The out-of-the-box search box searches the entire blog, which isn’t a help. Another tip from MT Extensions deals with this subject. I probably should look in the MT documentation, too (ahem…).

We, Troy and I, decided that in our context the calendar has no real use but does have the potential to confuse our readers. We suspect that for blogs covering scheduled activities (such as our upcoming construction) non-blog-savvy readers (and we have many) will try to use the calendar to get schedule information. So off it goes!

While I was considering the sidebar calendar (is it necessary and/or would it be misinterpreted as somehow relating to the construction schedule) I started thinking of the lanuage we want to use on the site, our audience, and how the category pages are presented. We need to talk about this. I doubt that much of our audience is familiar with blogs (one or two staffers commented that they’re “not technical enough” for blogging) or blog “categories.” (I plan to ask my students in upcoming BI’s if they know what blogging is.) We might want to consider, for example, restricting access to the main blog page (the one that lists all the posts) and giving each category page a unique look and feel (assuming that we can). And not call it a category, and have some alternate language in addition to the term “blog” (perhaps “Journal” for construction, “Tip Sheet” for research tips, etc., something like that). Once I learn about backups we can start playing with the blog configurations in earnest.

Also, Troy: Lyn and I saw “The Fog of War” this evening, and it’s certainly worth seeing on the big screen. Excellent film!

Our usability study taught us that students view “Search” and “Search this Site” buttons and forms as equivalent to the Google whitebox. So, we’ll change the label of the blog search box to the specific “Search the MVCC Blog.” Also, we’re beginning to collect some useful info here, so we have to learn how to back this up.

For review, these just caught my eye:
> The One True B!X?s Portland Communique
> Library Monk
> CAITE
> ZEMPT Multi-Platform Posting for MT

OkeyDokey, we can post, and we have categories. The next jobs:
? We need to make it look better. I assume that this is our (library’s, not IT’s or marketing’s) responsibility.
? We need to determine what links we want on the main page, if any, and what sidebar sections (calendar, recent posts, archives, categories, etc.).
? We need to make the category pages look like blog pages (including select sidebar stuff, perhaps specific to a category).
? We need to find out how to provide independent feeds for each category.
? A small design issue, but I’d like to put little bullets/graphic before each category item entry in the sidebar.

Then, we determine what’s next, next.