My First BDDBlog Design Decisions

Website navigation should just work from the users perspective. It should seem simple and intuitive they should never have to think about it. That of course means the burden to 'think about it' is on the developer. Today I spent some time trying to decide how I wanted navigation to work in my new blog. It wasn't as easy to make these decisions as I would have expected before hand.

Specifically I was trying to figure out exactly what a reader expects to see when they navigate to the home page and where they expect to find older posts. I spent a fair bit of time looking at other blogs and in the end I found two basic approaches.

In one case the blogs tend to provide some number of recent posts one below the next on the home page. Typically the posts are separated by dates as appropriate. This style seems to be more appropriate for blogs with frequent small posts.

The other common approach was to only display the most recent post on the homepage and to provide navigation links to previous posts. This style seems to be more appropriate for blogs with longer posts.

This left me a bit unsure at first. Quite a few of my posts are much to big for Blogger's format. On the other hand It's not entirely uncommon for me to do micro posts. What to do?

Well after spending quite a bit of time thinking about it, for now, my decision is that I'll use the latter style. My blog will feature a single post per page and provide links to older or newer posts as appropriate but this means I can't easily roll a twitter or delicious summary into my blog without it displacing the most recent post.

After spending some time pondering that problem I decided that I may not be able to roll those other feeds into my blog but it most certianly doesn't prevent me from splicing them into my feed.

So it looks like I've already stumbled on to another requirement; the ability to splice multiple RSS/Atom feeds into one. Feature creep already =(

On the other hand maybe I've stumbled on to a useful service? Atom/RSS Feed splicing with format conversion? Does anyone already offer that? Hmmm... I'll have to think about that one.