Yes folks! That’s right. I need your input!

For a while now, it keeps annoying me no end that the front page of sneaker.org is so cluttered and hard to read. I myself have trouble keeping I straigt sometimes! And a couple of good people have been kind enough to offer positive criticism about it too. So Iknow the issues, but I don’t have a good solution. So I’m just going to lay out the issues here and request that some of you who are more design/html proficient than I will have some good suggestions I could use to improve the usability of this site.

So here is the list of issues/considerations:

1) The front page is cluttered with too much information.

The front page is currently a syndicated blog of the four main blogs I maintain: whatsnew (What’s new @ sneaker.org), writings (Thought — caught in the act!), quotes (Eavesdropped!) and reviews (Rants and Raves). The reaosn for this is that I update all four blogs relaively often and I would like people to see all of them as opposed to only seeing the one that is on the front page.

One proposed solution is to pick only one and show that on the opening page and put *new* images next to the others in the navigation when there is new content, but I’m still thinking about that.

2) The front page takes a long time to load.

This is a function of the above as well as the fact that the current script o count the number of comments is just very inefficient because of it’s use of Perl and having to open each comment file o get a count each time. Now I could just move to aspcomments and fix that, but that would mean building the box with Windoze and opening up to all kinds of security issues. The Linux box has been working great with minimal problems thus far (this is NOT an open invitation to the hackers reading this… please leave my box alone! 🙂 )

3) The blog archives are not linkable which makes them unsearchable.

This is my personal pet peeve with the site. I’m using Frames in order to show the blog archives because that way I have the entire site automated using SSI (Serve Side Includes) and Blogger, so I don’t have to muck around too much (not that I mind mucking around, but the less time I spend mucking around, he more ime I spend writing… so…). But what the use of Frames does is that I cannot provide direct links to the blog entries. And that seems to be becoming increasingly important. Also, google et al, index the page and I can see people searching for specific things which were there on a previous date, but since google brings them to the frame index page, they can’t really find what they are looking for since it’s moved deeper into the mess of frames and archives.

I guess if I stop syndicating the 4 blogs on the front page and leave only the whatsnew then I could just use Blogger to generate the shtml files which would do everything right… but that would mean that the front page doesn’t have some of the funnier stuff and people may not read it… what a dilemma.

4) Link colors and subheading colors are the same.

This IMHO is bad style. Since the hyperlinks are green and the subheadings are green as well, does that cause any confusion about what is clickable or not?

There’s my list of issues with the site. And while I can go ahead and putz around to fix it, I’d like getting yout input first! So please leave me some comments attached to this entry or email me. Thanks!

For over a week no sneaker.org has been pretty static. Which for me translates into boring. It all started with that stupid Wingdings crap. I happened to post it on the Net and it kind of blew itself out of proportion. Recently, judging from the level of activity in my web logs (traffic was up atleast 6 if not 10 times more than usual because of it) I think it is finally dying down. It was fun initially, but by now I’m so sick of it, that I think it is a good idea to move sneaker.org along and not get caught up in this rut. Even spending time writing about crazy shit like this is a waste of time, effort and bandwidth.

But before I put this topic to bed off of sneaker.org I figured I would thank all of those people who came here, visited the site and took the time to leave their comments, sign the guestbook or even email me or IM me. Thanks to ALL of you. I had several interesting conversations with many of you and talking to some of you and watching the activity on the site was a pleasant reprieve from what was otherwise a harrowing week or ten days (because of multiple allnighters in order to meet some deadlines…). You comments and reaction has definitely run the gamut from praise and gratitude to contempt and disdain. But all of them are welcome 🙂 The one which made me laugh the most is one that was sent to me by email. I’m quoting it below, but will refrain from posting the email address of the sender.

Subject: [sneaker.org/whatsnew]: blog response

Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 18:34:11 -0500

From:”Thomas Bodtke” <email suppressed>

To: <sneaker@sneaker.org>

You know, it must nice to be so damn smart in a world of idiots.

Did you ever think that some of us ‘idiots care, and would, in

a heart beat, pass on whatever we could to help this insane situation,

that we all face. Why don’t you consider getting a life, you weed!

You really are an ass! Someday you will realize it.

A Caring Person

Now, I responded to most of the emails I received, but I didn’t respond directly to my dear “caring person” since if he really thinks that spreading competely baseless and unfounded rumors in any way helps the cause of the victims and the families affected by the events on Spetember 11th, then there is little more I can think of saying to this person other than: “Your hearts in the right place, but I can’t say the same about your head.”

In fact for that matter I have a lot of respect for Congresswoman Barbara Lee who in the midst of crisis maintained her ability to think for herself and the conviction to stand alone in support of her opinion.

Anyhow, folks, again, thank you and time to move on from the psychic font or the psychedelic font or whatever the heck you wish to call it today (Where to you want to go today…).