February 2007 marks five years of fourhman.com archives. I was weblogging for a few years before 2002, but that was when I first installed Movable Type and made the leap to a professional amateur website. And as all Americans know from last September 11th, the fifth anniversary is the most important anniversary ever and everything should immediately stop and everyone must pay attention to whatever happened five years ago. Fourth anniversary? Piffle. Sixth? I can't even pronounce "sixth." But the fifth, well mister, you just sit your ass down and pay attention to how true heroes live.
So I thought I'd take a few to lay out some of the stuff I'd like to do within fourhman.com's next five years.
When's the next re-design? Am I due? This red-and-khaki look debuted in October '05, which is like thirty in web years. I've done seven complete re-designs in over a decade, some of which can still be found at archive.org. Overall, I like this look, but I've never been happy with how sparse things get once you scroll down any given archive page. So I can easily see some tweaking is in order. Which brings us to the first actionable item...
Switch to entry-based archives. Most weblogs I follow are archived by having each entry living on its own page (or, for the more ambitious bloggers, by day). Back when I started this, I was posting stuff maybe once a week, so a monthly archival solution seemed fine. Five years later, I have all these really heavy archive pages that scroll on endlessly and do not inspire efficient or attractive browsing. This changeup would allow for...
The return of comments. I had comments enabled on my game review pages until I started getting outbreaks of spam in them. For several months, I had to go in and hand-remove hundreds of fake, potentially viral comments... and that killed that idea. The best way around the problem centers around me finally paying for Movable Type instead of using the free-license version. Then I can handle a registration-based commenting system (like Blogger) that puts an end to random robot-generated spambombs.
If I switch to entry-based archive pages, I could easily add a space for visitor comments after every posting. At the moment, any interactivity is limited to that ShoutBox on the main page. I'd like to get back to a more open forum. Not that I expect more than a Comments (0) on any given entry, but I know it's something that I often take advantage of on the weblogs that I visit most, so I want to be able to offer that here.
Fold in the game reviews. Five years ago, my game reviews were theoretically the stars of the show. Now, they're just this waning sidebar feature. Half the time, I end up doing more-or-less reviews inside the main body of the weblog itself, so the formal game reviews do little more than add in stolen screenshots and an Amazon.com link.
What I plan on doing is making the "reviews" just part of the core weblog, which would be another beneficiary of moving to entry-based archiving. This also neatly removes any faux pressure to write a new one.
Quick-commented links out. One thing I struggle with is the preponderance of gigantic, overlong weblog postings. I'd like to be able to just throw up a link out to something stupid and/or amazing and just have a couple lines of snide commentary for you. Something really short, you know? My current design doesn't let me write short entries, because then the whole layout gets botched and looks like ass. So I want to zone off a small area where I can link to something, include a brief writeup, and have done with it. I'm thinking a lot of links out to current events news, stupid videos, game rumors... the kind of stuff I would love to post but do not necessarily have a lot to say on the matter.
I know I overwrite at times, and I know that nobody reads that kind of thing. Nothing is more daunting for a reader than to come across this lengthy, meandering page with no images and no self-editing. A quick-links section would let me post more interesting stuff and say less about it.
A Wii version? I've already set up wii.fourhman.com to point to the lo-fi version I output for cell phones, but that's just a temporary fix. Depending on how my other ideas go, I may set up a third template that's specifically engineered for the Wii browser (and yeah, I would like to re-do that mobile template as well). Of course, it would be presumptuous to bother with this until the final version of the Wii's Internet Channel is released.
Like many things on my site, having a Wii version would be largely for my benefit. We use the Internet Channel often enough out of sheer convenience that I can see the benefits of doing a fourhman.com with a slightly altered layout.
In the short term, I may begin by re-working my MT template code and investigating the more advanced archiving stuff. Beyond that, I really need to buy the Big Boys' version of Movable Type and see what other improvements that can offer.
