20 January, 2007

Only 10 Posts

The current settings for this blog allow for only the 10 most recent posts to remain on the index page. My guess is that this was done to hinder the sometimes virulent string of comments that would form on some posts. But the limit to 10 posts seems to me to also hinder healthy or otherwise interesting discussion. I know I can click a link to get to the older post, but it is sort of counter-intuitive to do so. When I no longer see a post on the front page it seems like the discussion has already ended. I say, return to a longer posts list. How about letting at least the first week or two weeks of posts remain? What do others think?

9 comments:

nzm said...

Agreed.

The short duration for posts to remain on the homepage is also leading to repetition of information being posted.

Set it so that the posts remain on the homepage for 7 days before disappearing. At the moment, they're sometimes gone after 2 days.

samuraisam said...

The problem is the page takes ages to load when there are too many posts, not only that, the page is already over-crowded as it is, there are literally hundreds of links on each side of the page; for new users it is probably a bit daunting.

B.D. said...

Why don't we just up the number of posts to 15 as a quick fix. Then we might consider something like creating a separate links page. I think some of the slow loading issues have had to do with the old to new blogger shift and the recent network problems in the UAE.

nzm said...

When I load the page, I find that the things that hold up the loading are:
- the link images hosted by Photobucket - i.e. the green and orange ones on the top left and the changing icons on the top right
- the blogrolling lists

While the blogrolling lists are required, they could be tidied up - there are a lot of dead blogs and double-ups.

Sam, if you need someone to administrate the blogroll links, I'd be happy to help there. Email me at: matdxb(at)freenet.de if I can be of assistance in this area.

samuraisam said...

bd: I have just increased the front page post count to 15, it will take a good 5 minutes or so to republish. The page has always loaded slowly, I'm thinking I might redesign when we get switched over to blogger.

nzm: I'll have a look at alternative hosting for the images. As for blogrolling lists, I can't do anything to adjust them (in terms of loading times)
When we are switched over to the new blogger it is I'm going to go thoroughly through the lists and remove dead blogs, but even so, there are at least one or two people requesting their blog be added every day.

B.D. said...

Thanks Samuraisam. I know tidying up or revamping the site is a big job. I agree it would be better to wait until it gets transferred to new Blogger.

Lirun said...

i agree too

:)

when its longer its more like a newspaper than a news flash..

nzm said...

Thanks Sam!

secretdubai said...

We do go through the blogrolls every few months and try to cull "dead" links - I think sam posted about this last time with a list of ones that were removed. We had a three month no posting cut off, something like that.

I am hoping that if/when we move to New Blogger we will have a little more flexibility with the template. I would quite like to have a "latest comments" feature in the sidebar, that would highlight active discussions.

Another idea would be to have a template where only the first/most recent couple of posts show in full, thereafter everything is in cut-mode, enabling more posts to be seen in the same space. I know this can be done in WordPress but I am not sure about Blogger - it still seems like quite a weak system.

Anyone's suggestions/blogger/template hacks are always very welcome. There's no harm in trying something new out - if it really doesn't work or people dislike it, we can always revert.

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