Book Blogging Organization · 20 March 2007
I’ve posted another review in the reviews section and I thought it might be helpful (to me and to my readers) if I clarified what I hope the site layout matures into.
Honeyed-Words.com is loosely organized around the idea that I read a book and then bring in ancillary commentary related to my experience of that book via food or other interdisciplinary means.
Books that I choose to “feature” in this manner (such as In the Time of the Butterflies and The Onion Girl) will be posted in the main section of this site, and their reviews will appear on the front page. Depending on the viability of interdisciplinary discussion about any given book, I expect that feature discussions will last an average of two weeks. As a general note, only books that I enjoyed will make it to the feature section, though not all books I enjoy will be featured. I estimate that I read about six books per month and naturally some of these books translate better into the culinary world than others.
My goal is that other books that I review, good or bad, will be added to the Reviews section. Permalinks to all book reviews appear in the Archives section regardless of whether they were featured or not. So far, I have quite a backload of books that I’ve read in 2007 that I haven’t written reviews for. Once I get more proficient with the technical aspects of the site and finalize the design, I should have more time to write about the books.
Right now, with only two reviews in the separate reviews section, I haven’t added an index. Currently, to find any of the reviews, featured or not, just use the “browse” function and select the “book reviews” category. As I organize the site more, I’m considering adding the following functionality:
- The “Queue” – A list of all books on my reading list
- The “Vault” – A list of all books that I’ve read in a given period, including a notation on whether they’ve been reviewed or not
- An index page for all reviews, sorted by genre
What do you guys think? As readers, is this layout functional for you? As foodies, do you find the literary information extraneous and distracting? My hope is to bring together the conspicuous consumption of both books and food and introduce a holistic discussion about the merits of both. Am I boring both my target audiences in trying to force this? Let me know if you have an opinion
-
Share this article
Potato Pizza (A feast for the stomach) and Greek Blood (A feast for the eyes) First Day of Spring Cucumber Salad
Add Comment
Stefan · 21 March 2007, 11:07
The layout how it is now is fine. Keep it simple, flashy stuff distracts. Something that might happen tho the way you set it up now is that people miss out on certain blogs. I do read some of the more popular Dutch blogs (movie and reviews) and the thing I like about blogs is that I lean back, keep the mouse in my hand and just scroll down and at the bottom I click on the next page button and so on. What I do on this site is click on the archives monthbutton on the right to see if I missed something after reading teh stuff on the main page(but that is cause im interested in what you wrote, I wonder if the casual reader who you want to get hooked on your site and visits your site out of the blue will invest the “effort” to see what more stuff you wrote).
The browse function on the right looks fine for now, but in a year when you added another 50 blogs don’t you think the list will be too long? What about categorizing it a bit more? For example, I click on the browse thingie, I go through the subjects and im interested in your cookies, when I click on it, I get a list of urls printed out to all your blogs about cookies and from there I can choose which interests me the most.
I sometimes get a funky error:
Notice: Page template reviews does not contain a txp:article tag in /home/.koobees/fortrix/honeyed-words.com/textpattern/publish.php on line 462
You might wanna fix it. I get it sometimes when I click on Add Comment or when I click on the mainpage Reviews link.
Sometimes you include an url to another website in your blogs, maybe its just me, but its “annoying” in a way that it doesnt open in a new browserwindow. ( did that intentionally?)(people might get distracted and stay on that site and forget about your site)
Hope it makes sense, maybe its even helpfull. Keep up the good work :)
p.s. you know im a follower of the religion of Dahl, so pls fix the add comment to your “Kiss kiss” blog
Kim · 21 March 2007, 16:28
I was already thinking that I should add more articles to the front page, so I bumped it to the last 3 instead of the most recent.
Hmmm… for links, there are two schools of thought. People who use tabbed browsers (including me) tend to hate things that open in a new browser and will click on a link in tabs.
There might be a way to open in new tabs, I’ll check out the W3C on that.
Thanks for the heads up on comments not working on the Reviews section, I’ll have to spend some time in Textpattern help figuring out why. They’re set up the same way as comments in the main articles so I just assumed they would work. (Same with the .php error)
Commenting is closed for this article.