2008: the year that blogs stop looking like blogs?

Looks like I wasn’t the only one to rethink the way their site looks: Régine Debatty’s wonderful We Make Money Not Art had a radical redesign yesterday. As with my redesign, the goal seems to be to have non-RSS visitors have a cleaner experience, eliminating the endless blog-scroll-of-death.

In Régine’s case, she’s kept an overview page with multiple stories but reduced the “teasers” on these to little more than images (how will she deal with entries that have no images, I wonder?) while the entries sit by themselves, much as my entries do. Its nice to see a continuity with the existing site and the search bar as title bar is fabulous. I’m surprised to see that such a radical redesign is possible within Movable Type, kudos to Régine and her designer.

Then there’s Brett Steele’s redesign of his site. Brett’s abandoned his old resarch.net site and now has brettsteele.net an interesting WordPress-driven site that he hopes reminds us of the New Yorker and the Economist. Brett’s design freely mixes his blog with announcements about his appearances, what he’s reading, the classes he’s teaching and so on.

Over at aggregät 4/5/6, Enrique is experimenting with different platforms as well.

3 thoughts on “2008: the year that blogs stop looking like blogs?”

  1. hey, thanks for the mention.
    hey, thanks for the mention. it made the day of max who has spent so many sleepless night working on that new design. i think that in my case the redesign is mostly motivated by my own vanity. 65% of my readers check the blog through their feed readers so why should i care so much about the design of the homepage? it hit me in the face two days ago when i saw how pitiful any attempt to redesign my blog looks on rss feeds. i also felt that the anti-chronological layout of the blog was not responding to my needs. i caught myself several times changing the dates of some of my posts because i wanted this story or another to appear first on the homepage, even if i had written a story two days after. plus my stories getting increasingly long and the images increasingly big requested too much scroll-down action. see you in Munich!

  2. i’ve been into this lately too…
    hi kazys – i was catching up by reading your website and saw this post —
    i’ve been pretty into modding up wordpress for similar reasons (although maybe as a budget CMS, less than a proper blog)… aaaarg.org, thepublicschool.org, telic.info are all done in wordpress and i think they largely don’t look like it.

  3. Modified Online Presence
    So I’ve modified my online presence a little bit. Although I am keeping aggregat456.com as the main site for creating lengthier posts, I am using Tumblr as my portal site. Tumblr is incredibly intuitive and elegant, and suitable only for shorter posts. This way, by subscribing to the aggregat456 RSS feed, I can create another “catalog” of my writings, and add new things as well to the Tumblr site.

    If someone clicks on a link on the Tumblr site, they will be automatically redirected to the page version of the Blogger post.

    This seems a little counterintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense for my writing … which is not as frequent as I would like.

    Also, Tumblr has more options for posting (via iPhone/iPod Touch/Dashboard Widget) which make this whole process a lot more responsive and quicker.

    Plus … Tumblr just looks better. And it doesn’t look like a blog.

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