Weekend Music with New Design Rollout!!

This video seems appropriate today. The design still needs a bit of tweaking, but for the most part, it’s in. First, a very important change in the way I’m using my blogs.

If this blog is the only way you have of keeping up with the Feminist Friday Project or my other fiendish plots, look to Just Gene’O for that info now. Once contributors get rolling  next month, I can’t be telegraphing my every move on our daily pop culture blog.

@Sourcererblog is still my main channel on Twitter. Feminist Friday links and all other Part Time Monster/Just Gene’O links are still tweeted from that account. If Twitter is the way you keep up, don’t worry about @justgeneo unless you’re already following that one.

The New Design

I’ve given you a reason to rate posts and thumbs-up comments. If you look at the sidebar, just beneath all the “Follow Us” and “Recent Posts” widgets, you will find one labeled “Top Rated.” That widget counts the ratings you give posts and pages with the little stars. It also counts comment thumbs-ups.

I’ve put all the ratings at the bottom of the posts/pages/comments so you don’t have to scroll up to find them. If I see enough rating activity going on here over the next couple of months to warrant it, I will leave that widget on the sidebar. The best part about this? Ratings are anonymous. And now they mean something because they affect the “Top Rated” rankings.

The “Recent Posts” widgets you see strewn about the sidebar show you posts at current contributors’ blogs. These widgets will change as people come and go. Their order will change based on who is posting. This is to help you see what the bloggers who publish here are doing at their own blogs and make it easier for you to find them.

Now that we have footers, we’re only displaying our three most recent posts on the front page, and we’ll be making extensive use of the “More” tag. To make up for that, I’ve added a collection of archive links to the lower half of the sidebar.

The Blogroll is gone. It’s replaced by “Blogs I Follow” in the footer. That’s a different list than the one at Just Gene’O because it belongs to the Sourcerer account. I’ll unfollow and re-follow my friends periodically to bump people to the top of that list.

The “Thanks for Stopping By” widget in the footer is a Community widget to help us see who’s stopped by recently.

The Facebook widget now displays timeline activity instead people who have liked the page. This is because I don’t want to be displaying people’s personal profile images on a blog, and because next year, I’m going to start using the page to do shares from WordPress and from my Facebook feeds. Eventually, that widget will show you things other than our latest posts.

“Things We’ve Published” shows you the last three posts from each contributor. It only captures contributors with dashboard access, so I’m going back to posting the contributors I paste in from the Sourcerer account.

You have seven pull-down menus to navigate the blog. It’s seven because the mobile displays only four header items in a row and I don’t want the menus more than two deep.

• Bylines are author categories.
• Pop Culture includes Comics, Games, Books, Movies, T.V., and Myths.
• Pop Culture is not a category. The main menu is just a page I used to anchor the categories. I did it this way because I don’t want categories to have more than two levels, and I don’t have the header space to give all those topics separate menus.
• Photos are stand-alone because they include several categories and some people visit just for the photos.
• Social Media includes Blogs, Blogwanking, and Twitter. Blogs categorizes posts with outgoing links to specific blogs. Blogwanking includes all the stats posts and the Traffic/Engagement stuff.
• Playlist is the video and music collection. I separated this from pop culture because I want people who enjoy the video picks to have a top menu of their own. The main category includes some essay-type posts about music as well as the videos.
• Misc. is for everything else. Feminist! has all the early Feminist Friday discussions and some related posts. Evil Schemes is for the communication with peeps I’ve been filing under notes, announcements, plans, etc. Year One is the original pages.

We also have a new tagline: “Pop Culture and Geekery with a Dash of Mischief,” and I have to give props to I’ll Make It Myself for the inspiration. I borrowed the structure of her tagline and did word substitution to come up with our new one.

I’m planning to randomize the header image. Diabolo Sorcerer will remain in the mix, but I have a ton of free wallpapers of spellcasters stashed away. Magic users both male and female of many different races, colors, and types. I want to add a ton of those and not tell anyone how many there are. So they change every time you load a page, and you’re never sure if you’ve seen them all. How’s that for a blogger trick? 😉

“Diabolo Sorcerer with SatyrGod Steampunk Background” remains the official art on all other social media.

What say you, peeps?

Is this a better blog?