New Site Concepts #1: A Single Timeline
As I mentioned earlier today, there's a lot of ideas and concepts I've been playing with while building this site.
The first is around the idea of aggregating separate streams of personal data into one coherent weblog. This follows on from the work of Erik Benson on his erikkregator and Jason Kottke on his combined homepage
Something that doesn't seem right to me about either site, or my old site, is that the only place all the data appears aggregated together is on the homepage. Different sections have their own separate archives, and navigating between them isn't as easy as I'd like.
So, one of the underlying principles behind the new site is that all the different streams are combined into a single consistent timeline. In other words, the order of the entries is the same everywhere it appears - the homepage, monthly archives, and even the previous/next links on individual entry archive pages.
I also know that some people won't want to see the links, and some people will only be here for the links So, there's also individual homepages for each type of content:
At the moment there's only 2 types of content up, but it's been built so other types of content will just slot in. Photos, both from flickr and hosted locally, are likely to be next.
Of course, there's also individual RSS feeds for each section, and a combined feed containing everything. But more on that some other time.