Is “Perfectionism - the quest for the impossible” too long? Does it mess up your blogroll, or prevent you from seeing the number of new posts in your aggregator’s listing?
Tell me! If calling it “Perfectionism” alone would help, let me know and I’ll change it. Or if you want me to call it something totally different, now’s your chance to suggest it 
h3. Update
Why do weblogs have a “Recent Entries” menu? Is this to make people who enter on a single entry page want to read some other post? I’m going through the menu trying to decide what to trim out of it - the calendar’s gone, now the rest is potentially under the axe. Again, *please* _say_ what you find useful when reading/navigating a weblog!
12 comments ↓
Well, I don’t believe “female aardvark” is taken, so… wait, what am I saying?
“Perfection” is good. Y’can still keep “the question for the impossible”, as a tagline. One of the good things about MT.
One thing I like is a “Recent comments” list, especially with the blogs I read a lot. Helps to keep track of conversations.
I’ve changed that now - shame MT doesn’t supply a special tagline field, and instead you have to use the description…
I’ve pondered the same about the recent entries list, and I decided that they indeed serve a useful purpose for people who land on your single entry pages. They get a see a quick sample of your interests, with more specificity than just categories. I was never sure about this, but I think it might make it easier for screenreaders to check on what you have written recently as well.
One more comment: if you decide to keep with the recent entries, you can still pare things down by reducing the list to 5 entries or some other arbitrary number, heh.
caiuschen makes a good point about recent entries. Personally I keep them to 5, since 10 is a little too much information.
Things I find indispensible: a search box, and category-based archives.
Well, right now your home page title shows up as $MTBlogName$ - The quest for the impossible.
Anyway - I think it’s fine, not too long by any means. I do have some advice, on your indivdual archives you might want to put the title of the page first and the name second.
Like this - “weblog name too long? - Perfectionism” that helps search engines in finding your posts (if you title them correctly) and really, if someone is at your site, they know where they are so…
As far as the navigation - I don’t ever use a calendar, but I do use the recent entries and archives. What you have now is good.
Page title fixed - I was playing with using template modules
Doesn’t Jacob Nielson recommend that you title pages with the site name first, so that people’s bookmarks are easier to use?
The other thing is of course blogrolls. I guess people use them because it’s (usually) a reciprocal linking scheme, but again they take up loads of space. Worth having?
Personally I find blogrolls essential. They’re not about reciprocal linking - they’re a way of telling the world which blogs you read, a kind of personal recommendation. The way I see it there are several million blogs out there so to stay sane you really need to pick and choose the ones you read. I learn about new blogs from links on other blogs, and my blogroll is a way of sharing my recommendations with others. If you like my blog, the chances are you’ll like some of the blogs I read. Also, if you use http://blo.gs/ to power the blogroll you get a great way of seeing which blogs have recently updated.
I agree with Simon: a links list (I refuse to use the b-word) is not about recyprocal linking, but more about recommending good ‘blogs: telling everyone which ones you read, sort of thing. Crikey, if everyone who I linked to felt the need to return the favour, I’d have the most popular ‘blog this side of the black stump. At least, I’d have my host angry at me for all the incoming traffic…
I find “recent entries” that point to entries still on the main page entirely useless and rather irritating (taking up valuable real estate, etc.). However, a few people modify the recent entries list so that it shows entries that’ve scrolled off the page (say, using offset=”7″ or something… it’s been a while since I used MT), which can be useful if people are still interested in old discussions on an old post. However, Jan’s suggestion of a “recent comments” list is probably a much better way to go about that: depends on whether you think you receive enough comments to make it worthwhile (”recent comments” usually exists either to stroke the author’s ego, or to aid readers in keeping up with comments-thread discussions).
Simon: don’t you have a problem on “blo.gs”:http://blo.gs that often it says that it doesn’t know the blog you’re trying to add? I’ve just started playing with blogrolling.com, but don’t like it as much (seems too commercial).
mark: I’ll try and find the MTIf/else syntax somewhere, and include the blogroll on the front page, with recent something-or-other instead on the other pages.
>> Simon: Personally I find blogrolls essential. They’re not about reciprocal linking - they’re a way of telling the world which blogs you read, a kind of personal recommendation.
I totally agree. It is an excellent way of chancing upon blogs you will likely be interested in. Thanks to Simon’s and Phil Ringnalda’s blogrolls, I discovered several other interesting blogs which I take an interest in add to my blogroll.
In fact, I was so envious of Simon’s blogroll that I got Phil Ringnalda’s phpblogroll script and tweaked it to look just like his.
Btw, if you’ve problems with the blo.gs bookmarklet that adds a blog to your blo.gs favorites as you’d mentioned, it’s probably because the URL is incorrect - the URL of the page you’re at must _exactly_ match that registered on blo.gs. Often I just go to the main index or tweak the URL before using the bookmarklet.
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