New blog, new guidelines

I’m taking the opportunity of this new blogging platform to institute some new policies that will hopefully improve the way you read the weblog and the way I get things done. So that we are all on the same page, I’m going to share them with you.

First of all, these are my personal guidelines. If Ralph, Chris, Rob or others want to work differently, they are welcome to do so.

1. No posts on the weekend. Barring a sale of the New York Times (not entirely out of the realm of possibility) or something similarly shocking occurring in the college newspaper world, no new content will appear on this weblog over the weekend. Traffic drops greatly over this time, anyway. I may find something that’s worth mentioning over the weekend (when I read weblogs instead of watching TV), but it will wait until Monday.

2. Round-up posts on Friday. If you miss something we wrote during the week, I plan to have a “round-up” post on Friday. I shamelessly stole this idea from the must-read tech blog Lifehacker, although they call theirs “This week’s best posts” - I’ll make no such claim.

3. More use of the “More” tag. For those who read the weblog from their web browser, instead of through an RSS newsreader, I will make more use of the “extended entry” in posts. Unless the entire entry is a paragraph, I will put most of it “below the fold.” That will help readers scan the headlines to see if there is anything interesting to them. Readers of the RSS feed will notice no difference, as the RSS feed contains full entries of all weblog posts.

4. More categories. If you look through the “categories” link in the right sidebar, you might notice that I’ve started adding categories that are more descriptive than the categories we had in the previous weblog. I’m also going to start “tagging” posts for Technorati, but that’s likely not of interest to a great number of our regular readers.

Other comments or suggestions about how we can improve the site, or items you’d like to see us address are always welcome. Drop them in the comments below.

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