Changes coming to the weblog

I’m making this list as much for my own benefit (as I start implementing all of this), but there are a number of changes coming to tins (what is tins? More on that in a minute):

• I’ll be folding my Howard Dean blog into this one. My original intent with the separate blog was to create a site that would focus on a long-shot candidate’s quest for the presidency; today, that’s no longer Dean’s position. The more I thought about it, the less it seemed to make sense to keep these two sites separate — I’ve made no secret of my political interests on tins, so this will not be particularly jarring to anyone who reads the site. (This will also dramatically decrease my maintenance time in managing the back end of these sites.)


• For those who don’t care for my political writings, or think my thoughts on KM are a waste of time (you know who you are!), you’ll be able to brose the site by category. This will also apply to RSS feeds — you’ll be able to pick the feeds you’re interested in (or the full feed, including all those wonderful tangents). This requires adding categories into my 1400+ posts over the past two years — a non-trivial matter!


• Related reading and browsing. I’ll be toying with a couple different approaches to this, but the idea is to provide links to additional resources based on the content of my post. At the bottom of each entry you’ll have the ability to go away.


• Retooled blogroll. My blogroll is hopelessly out of date. I thought about taking it down, but Halley’s comments suggest that I just need to find a better way to manage this. (Irony? The most linked post I’ve got is my hack for managing a blogroll in MT.)


• Setting up a reviews weblog. This will be primarily book related, but I wrote about it a while ago and still think it’s a good idea.

• Improved UI, navigation. I’m still pretty happy with the look and feel of the site, but I’d like to touch it up a bit. I’m playing with a few ideas, you’ll likely see some work in progress at the site over the next week or so until I decide on an approach I like.

I’m open to other suggestions. Now that this blog is in its third year, I’m trying to find a way to ensure that the site remains useful. And since I’m a hopeless hack when it comes to tweaking things, I like playing with new ideas to see what works, what doesn’t and why. So throw your suggestions this way, I’m happy to use this site as a guinea pig. (Provided, of course, no actual guinea pigs are harmed in any way. Unless it would be funny.)