After much thought and deliberation, I’ve brought back the “browsing” list on the sidebar (try clicking on that little tab to the left). Initially I left it out of the design for one reason: clutter. I dont like clutter, and I felt like on my last design things were getting cluttered. I looked for ways to cut back, to get rid of stuff, to minimise. As I started putting together my ideas for my redesign I started with a blank page. I added elements only as I found them necessary. Once I added all the main blog elements, I started adding a few extras here and there. The only extra that made the cut, at the time, was the Flickr thumbnails at the bottom.
I rarely had feedback about my links section, and when I did, it was usually from a certain PC zealot friend of mine when I posted pro-mac links. Aside from that, few people mentioned it. After the redesign, nobody mentioned its absence, until I posted about it, and even then few commented. I figured oh well, it wasn’t missed.
But I missed it. I enjoy posting interesting links and so I continued to ask around to people to see if they ever found them interesting, pertinent, or otherwise. My wife never read them, but aside from her, I found that many people did read and click through the links. They just never mentioned it.
So, I’m bringing it back. I tried to make it non-intrusive in the design. If you don’t care to see the links, you don’t have to. If you want, well, just click the tab to the left.
I’m also tweaking my RSS feed offerings. If you prefer to only get the articles, then choose the articles feed. If you prefer to have the links separate, choose the links feed. If you want them combined into a single feed, that’s available too. If you had already subscribed to this site before today, then the combined feed is what you’re getting now.
The tabbed drawer that slides out uses Javascript. If you have that disabled, you can easily access the links via the new Browsing menu item above, which leads to the Browsing Archives. Easy enough, eh?
I hope you enjoy the new links, and I hope I enjoy posting to them. Feedback is welcome.
All articles on this site are licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. All design, code, etc are All Rights Reserved.
Icons by iconbuffet and FAMFAMFAM.
Be Good Not Bad is all about really good web design, based on the utmost respect for web standards, accessibility and respect for the user. Based in Denver, Colorado, Be Good Not Bad is run by Brian Warren, freelance designer, blogger, homebrewer and coffee nut.
Very nice! I definately like the cleaner look, and this adds the fuctionality back in without messing with the new design. It is a bit hard to notice, but I guess that’s ok for your purposes. If you wanted it a bit more noticable, you could make it a horizontal tab just below “categories” and slide it down from there. I do like the current location from a “pretty” point of view
One thing I might suggest is adding “cursor:pointer;” to the tab, so it looks like something clickable when you mouse over it.
Thanks again for the thoughts this weekend. We’ve already fixed the non-JS problem and are working on a few other tweaks. We’re going to be putting the site up as “Beta” this week for some testing.
§ By John Lein at 2:28am on May 31 2006 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
Great idea john! I made that tweak just now. I agree it looks a little better with the hand on hovering over the tab. Thanks!
§ By brian warren at 2:28am on May 31 2006 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel
hmmm… doesn’t work so well in my IE 5.0 just kidding… who cares… and your site looks great as usual Brian.
I did miss that section.
§ By David Fields at 2:28am on May 31 2006 ★ Are you sure? Delete // // Cancel