I was just reading this article on the Harper’s magazine site, and noticed that they give you quick access to 150 years worth of archived content within three simple header rows. I thought it was a pretty cool idea.
The article’s good too, by the way, but I’m steering clear of posting on politics here; this post is merely about the web design aspect of it.
Sparked by the recent TechCrunch post about the downward spiral of Pownce, (which itself was inspired by this Uncov piece), I thought I’d throw in my two cents on the issue.
I’ll start right off by saying that I don’t necessarily think a comparison to Twitter is completely valid, but then again, that’s probably part of Pownce’s problem. I don’t use Twitter, but it’s widely regarded as being an excellent tool for what it does, and a large piece of that value is its strict adherence to a model of simplicity.
If their intention was to compete with Twitter (which it seems to have been), they had a hard task ahead of them. They could either do the same thing (very limited functionality, done well) and just do it better (which they probably figured they couldn’t win at, and were probably correct) or go the route of adding more features on top and hoping to woo people over that way.
The problem with the latter approach is that they turned it into essentially a blogging tool with social networking features. I’m sure someone probably thought this was genius, but they missed the fact that people who want to blog already have excellent tools available to them, and most people currently have their fill of social networking on FaceBook.
In looking at Pownce (before I started using it), I used to think that it might be a good fit for someone who essentially wants to “blog” (posts + comments) but maybe wants an ultra-simple entry point. That part totally falls down, however, when it comes to following conversations, which is a key feature of blogs in my opinion.
Pownce does this very poorly: there is no good way to keep up with comment threads that you’ve either participated in or are interested in. I’ve talked plenty about how much I don’t like this aspect of Pownce before, both here and on Pownce itself, so no need to belabor that point.
I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while now, but I’m now hosting several different sites under this same WordPress MU installation. In addition to the freepressblog.org ones (mine and Martha’s), I recently added a couple other sites (other domains, hosted using the same WP installation): one for Martha’s school and the other for our latest foray into the land of podcasting.
All that to say that if anyone is looking for a place to host their blog, you’re welcome to do it here for free (friends only, non-commercial, normal traffic blogs of course).
The benefits would be that you would always be running in an up to date WPMu installation (similar to what you’d have if you signed up for a wordpress.com account), but with a bit more flexibility in terms of available themes, plugins, etc., as well as being able to pick your own name.
You can have whatever.freepressblog.org, or just use your own domain name that you’ve already bought but don’t want to pay for web hosting for, and you can have the whole scope of *.yourdomain.com to set up multiple blogs under.
The only drawbacks would be that I can be a bit picky about installing themes or plugins (I would have to review and approve them first), and I wouldn’t allow certain types of advertising or other monetization methods that I deem inappropriate (TLA, pay per post, etc.)
Not trying to make any money or anything, just throwing it out there in case it might be useful to anyone.
Well, I finally got around to working on a new theme for a bit, so here it is. It may still need a bit of polishing up, but I think it’s ready enough at this point.
I always qualify any of these announcements by saying that I certainly don’t consider myself a graphic designer of any merit, but I’ve been wanting to start from scratch on here for quite a while now, and I figured I might as well take the opportunity to get some practice.
I’ll eventually get around to packaging it up and releasing it for anyone who’d like to use it too. To get a feel for how it works with a wider variety of content, you can see it in action at a blog I added with some sample data designed for testing out the theme.
Hope you enjoy it!
PS - I’ll probably also package up the plugin I whipped up to replace the blog description with my Facebook status too, if anyone’s interested in that.