You might have noticed, I moved away from the very simple white design I had to something with a darker background. The other thing that I’ve done after seeing it done in a few other places is that I placed a lot of the extras like archives and searching at the bottom. I don’t think people really use that stuff all that often and more or less just come here to read my latest entries. With that in mind, just a little over half of the screen is dedicated to the entry while the other half is dedicated to users comments. I honestly have never seen anyone else with a weblog do this.
People have this habit of hiding comments. I don’t really get it. I can see hiding them at a certain point, and making them second to my thoughts, but comments are such an interactive part of a blog. If I didn’t have comments, this would simply be a private, much more life-oriented account of my life that would be useless on the web. So while I may not exactly have "invented" this idea that my users comments are really important to me, I’d like to at least acknowledge the fact that I’m dedicating quite a bit of space on each page to them and I have yet to see anything like this anywhere else. Maybe it looks visually cluttered. I don’t think so, but one could argue there’s just too much text. Personally though, I like it!
Hev
June 30th, 2006 at 9:47 am
It’s like catering to your customers, in this case everyone looking at your blog is the customer and you’re like “Hey, you are all important so let me let you all have a piece of this blog too.” You should go into politics.
Jason Lancaster
June 30th, 2006 at 10:48 am
I’m too un-PC to ever be a politician. I just say whatever is on my mind.
Christopher M.
June 30th, 2006 at 11:39 am
I like the way that the site continue to change and evolve over time. The comments are a great interactive feature as you can share your views on an entry as well as read the ideas/views that others have on the topic.
Daddio
June 30th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Definitely, having the comments right there to see along with the blog entry is a great way to do it. I’m so used to seeing other blogs where you have to click to read comments, and then you can’t see what they’re commenting on — amazing it never occurred to me how stupid that is until you pointed it out. My son is a genius!
Erik
July 10th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Liking the new look Jason! Whole deal behind blogging is for user interaction, so hiding user comments never really made much sense to me either. Glad you’ve broken away from the norm. =)
Adam Douglass
July 12th, 2006 at 12:48 am
I think the difference might be that you only have 7 people that leave comments on your blog… Most blogs have 100’s of users and the comments would consume the layout of the page.
That, and its a good way to work in a nice burn.
Jason Lancaster
July 12th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Zing! Gee, thanks Adam