Gadgetopia

Why Everything You Think You Know About Blog Architecture is Wrong: This is a great article, which is so true. Blogs are outgrowing themselves, I think. We’re now a few years into the blog “revolution,” and blogs — this one included — are aggregating so much content that the old format is wearing thin.

Darn near every blog is the same, and this is thanks to the fact that just about every Content Management System (CMS) on the planet has the same default IA structure for blogs. Generally speaking, blogs are presented in reverse chronological order — that is, the newest, freshest content is presented first.

Unfortunately, this setup is speeding towards antiquity. It works for news sites, but unless your site falls under this heading, then I’m going to suggest that this is likely not the best setup for you […]

But when do you cease to become a blog, really? That fact is that the reverse chronological order is one of the calling cards of a blog. So where do you cross the line into “just” another Web site?

We need to make some changes around here, obviously. I have a new design percolating right now, and when we implement it we’re going to make some changes to try and bring older posts back to the forefront and group classic posts under specific subjects. I have a lot to say about content management, for example, but it’s all buried.

I’ve argued about this before, in a way. I’ve complained several times about what to do about long category archives, how to keyword posts so they group better, and how tagging may play into all this. Clearly, something has to be done.

(Of course, we made the “new information architecture” claim a while ago, and look where that got us. Here’s the thing about the classic blog format: it’s very comfortable. You don’t have to think about it or put time into it. And for a lot of bloggers, that’s a big consideration.)

Thanks, Declan.