November 11, 2003

RFB InfoArch

Christian Crumlish

Information architecture (IA) is just a fancy term for organizational structure.

Here are some things on my RFB IA to do list:

soonly
1. Reorg home page
2. Tweak categories

eventually
3. full site inventory
4. sitemap
5. review navigation
6. review nomenclature
7. search templates
8. external connections

TO ADD
author pages
monthly calendar view
popular searches?

HOME PAGE INVENTORY

Banner
logo / sitename
slogan
search
category nav

Recent blog entries
Date header (17 days)
Entries:
Headline
Byline
Entry
Datestamp / posted by / permalink / category
Nav to earlier days at bottom (NEED THIS)

Internal resources
What is Radio Free Blogistan? - needs revision, add links to contributor's names
Navigation:
Recent Entries (last 34)
Monthly Archives
Categories (actually in Banner)
This month (DEPRECATED)

On This Day in 2002, etc.

Subscribing:
Via email digest (via Bloglet)
Syndicated Feeds
Blogroll Me! Link (via Blogrolling.com)

Fine Print:
Creative Commons "some rights reserved" license
Credits:: {
Movable Type
MT-RSSfeed
Radio 8.0.8
MT-Blacklist (TO ADD)
Global Listings (TO ADD)
SimpleComments? (TO ADD? DOESN'T WORK WELL WITH MT-BLACKLIST?)
SmartyPants? (CAN CAUSE ENCODING PROBLEMS?)
}

External resources
xian's link log (The List) - bump up to 34 entries - DEBATE KEEPING
Lockergnome's RSS Resource (last 10 headlines)
Google Ads
RFB contributors home blogs (last 5 headlines each) - MONOBLOG REPEATS RFB HEADLINES
Metablog News:
Weblogging for Poets
Dave Pollard's Blogs and blogging Category
a klog apart
Blogroots
The Blog Herald
Blogonian (hasn't updated recently) - CUT?
Other suggestions?
Affiliations:
Salon
blogs signup
recently updates Salon blogs
Salong blog ranking
Well Beings blogroll (xian is on the well, Salon owns the well)

Badges:
Blogchalk
Technorati profile (should it still be just xian? - group picture?)
BlogShares (USED TO HAVE - ADD AGAIN?)
BlogSnob (USED TO HAVE - ADDS LITTLE VALUE IMHO)

xian's Sources: (RSS Feeds / Blogroll)


TO ADD TO THE HOME PAGE

Internal
Masthead - contributor listing, with links to author pages
Recent Comments
Essential Reading (autogenerated, DONE TODAY)

Most popular
DONE TODAY (guessing, suggestions?) - there's an MT plugin that can generate this with access to the logs. anyone want to help with that? anyone have a preferred apache log analyzer program in general? it would be cool also to abstract out all the incoming search terms, and maybe even make a zeitgeist page like that tensegrity guy does.

External
Recent Incoming Pings

REST OF SITE:

Category refinements:
add descriptions
make pingable
update templates

Should we auto-ping out (to Blogroots, kmpings, etc.?)

Posted by xian at November 11, 2003 2:08 PM
Comments

1. Reorg home page
I'm think that besides the Three-columns we may want to consider a horizontal nav bar.

2. sitemap
an index by categories and maybe keywords? BTW, what is the 'rule of thumb' for keywords? sex sex sex :-?

3. review nomenclature
???

4. Nav to earlier days at bottom
how far back in time? do you want this as a footer?

Posted by: liza at November 12, 2003 6:17 PM

I'm think that besides the Three-columns we may want to consider a horizontal nav bar.

I like that idea. We need to work out what the nav categories would be. In fact, the category-nav in the banner at RFB was at first intended as a horizontal nav, but there are too many items. If we work out the deeper IA of the site, we'd need to think what other organization schemes cut across the content beside topical categories.

an index by categories and maybe keywords?

Probably... also depends on the IA we work out.

review nomenclature

The names and labels of things. Something I always like to play with.

Nav to earlier days at bottom: how far back in time?

I just want someone at the bottom of the blog column on the home page to be able to continue on to the previous entry - nothing more elaborate than that.

do you want this as a footer?

not a page footer but yes in the sense of a block below the last entry in the blogbody series on the home page.

Posted by: xian at November 13, 2003 9:09 AM
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