Will and I were discussing blog frontpages yesterday. He was saying he was thinking of changing one of his blogs to a one post-a-day, one post on the front page format. That way there would be no “context” that might detract from whatever post was made on that day.
I, on the other hand, am worried about posts that were made a day or two ago that I still consider interesting, and that I was hoping people would comment on. I post so much that my stuff keeps getting bumped off the main page, and casual readers, who might not visit frequently or subscribe to the RSS feed/email, might not see everything. I think I have changed my mind about using a clip blog, simply because I want to treat all of my posts equally on the site.
Today I thought of a solution that would be great, if I could get it to work in WordPress.
Many blogs have a “recent entries” section in their sidebar–it’s built into Blogger’s templates now. I never had a use for such a thing, but I’ve been thinking that something similar might be effective. Basically, what I would like to do is have all of today’s posts show on the front page, either the full post or an excerpt, plus the number of comments. (Ideally it would show when the latest comment was posted, and by whom, but I haven’t seen anyone doing that so I don’t know if it’s possible.) After the posts of the day, there would then be the titles of yesterday’s posts (and maybe the day before yesterday’s? the whole week’s?), along with the comment information I just mentioned.
This would let people know if they’d missed posts, plus inform people of any commenting activity, plus not take up too awful much room on the page.
(“Too awful much”…I love that!)
So, that’s my idea. If I can make it work, I think it would be a good choice for my site. Any suggestions would be appreciated, of course.