The New Year is always a time to consider what’s passed and more importantly, what happens in the future as we look to what we hope will be another productive, happy and healthy new year. The same is true for blogs and other media outlets, and certainly it is the case here at DFE. I’ve been happy with the overall design of DFE’s appearance in this latest incarnation, but there are things that could stand some improvement. This version of the site was my first attempt at a WordPress MU installation, dealing with all the various blogs and cross-blog integration. All-in-all, it’s been a success, but nothing grows in a standing pool of water. Now’s the time, I think, to start considering and implementing a new plan to keep the waters circulating.

LeftyBlogs

Topping the list of tasks is to deal with the Lefty Blogs role in the sidebar. Frankly, while there’s lots of stuff in that blogroll that I find of value, there is a growing and remarkably annoying tide of cruft rising on that list. I won’t bother mentioning any names, but I don’t see the need to share links with stuff I find of limited or no value. Moreover, the group that handles this list has done absolutely nothing to improve it’s service in the four years I’ve been using it. I can’t stand loading JavaScript modules into a page without there being some logical reason to slow down my site, and LeftyBlogs has crossed the barrier between justifiable and unjustifiable somewhere over the course of this election season.

So to those Upstate bloggers who might be reading this, let me make a proposal: I’d like to create a “Planet Feed,” similar to the WordPress Planet, which aggregates several feeds of local blogs into one centralized feed, similar to LeftyBlogs in many ways. The difference would be that there’s no need for a JavaScript POS on your page to display the blogroll, you can display it any way you would normally syndicate RSS or Atom content on your page. That lends itself to much more robust uses of our collective content on our pages, while reducing the overall processing cost of making our pages load. Rotten, Exile and I have been discussing this and if you’d like to throw your support behind it, drop me a line here.

Page Layout

Secondly, the layout is a bit wonkier than I’d anticipated. My vision of DFE is to be an “island in the information stream” for my visitors: I would like the home page to seem a genuinely useful place for people to stop by while they’re surfing the news on the net. Based on my incoming and outgoing links, and reviewing common visitor sessions, it seems like this has been a largely successful plan for a modest number of you out there. I want to say thank you very much to those of you who have been making DFE a part of your browsing experience. It’s for you especially that I’m making these changes, so don’t hesitate to express your opinion of what I’m planning.

Because there’s more work to be done to eliminate the cruft that hasn’t been getting hits and tighten up the format. I think, for example, that my user blogs have been under emphasized on the home page and this is the first thing I plan on addressing. My blog may switch to the other side, the News Headlines will probably factor in more heavily, and the user blogs will be prominently placed above the fold.

I’m working on ways to integrate all the news clippings into the site better than the running list of images down the sidebar that I have now. They may become an entirely new page, I’m not sure. The news section is probably going to factor in much more heavily than it has in the past, so this is a critical part of the redesign.

So, in general, that’s what I’m trying to get done for the new year in terms of the layout of the page and the architecture. One other thing is going to be (eek. again) switching web hosts. I’ve made the unfortunate decision of going with a web host which I now find to be universally panned by the bloggers in town I’ve been speaking with (Rotten, BTP in particular). I’ve found a new host which will doubtless suit my needs better, but will require a much more hands-on approach to administration. There’s going to be a lot of planning involved in this, but the payoff for the audience should hopefully be a faster loading DFE with more stuff you want.

As for content changes, in terms of my blog and the news sections, I’ll be discussing that in a later post. There will definitely be some reorganization going on. If you’d like to express an opinion on my plans or offer suggestions, I’d be happy to hear from you, so drop me a line and let me know what you think!