Full Content on Home Page of my Blog?

I am thinking about putting the full content of the last 20 articles onto the homepage of my blog, just as most of blogs. The goal is to help people to glance at what is the recent articles on this blog without clicking into each article. Is it a good idea? I know for many, it does not matter since they read through RSS. I have full content delivered via RSS anyway.

11 thoughts on “Full Content on Home Page of my Blog?

  1. For me it doesn’t really matter because you have the very efficient “recent headlines” feature which makes it especially easy to just take a quick glance to see if I have missed anything. And the way you have it now, I don’t have to read very much to know if it’s an article of special interest to me (such as those about Yifan) or something that would not be so much (such as some of the more technical ones). I tend to dislike web sites which require me to wade though a great deal of content before moving on to a different topic. Many of the sites such as Google which do show at least the partial text of a large number of articles, still require the reader to click through at some point to finish reading the entire story. It seems to me your current “headlines” feature (along with the very helpful “related entries” already accomplishes this. My best guess is that the fact that no one else has commented on this question probably indicates general satisfaction with the current format. However, now that you have more blogging time on your hands, if you are feeling ready for a format change and want to exercise your creativity in re-designing the page, it’s your blog after all…we readers are not going to abandon you no matter what it looks like, so I think you should do whichever style pleases you :-)

  2. Thanks Carroll. Useful comment. As the writer, I already cannot see the way people read it, that is the reason I asked. That makes sense. Maybe I need to increase the recent entry list a little bit so people won’t miss it if they didn’t come for some time.

  3. The current format seems working well. I think the difference between your blog and many other bloger’ sites is that you do encourage readers to comment. For this reason, it is nice to be able to see both your new post and the headers of the previous posts, and the latest comments… as the current layout offers. However, as Carroll says, it’s your blog, we’ll still come here to read about your thoughts and, sometimes, exchange ideas. Get better soon, and have fun!

  4. Thanks GN! Although it is my blog, it is a community and any change to it impact my readers. :-) Keep the feedback coming. Now I turn to keep the current format – well. It is an example to demonstrate that when people are free, they may do something unnecessary, not the core. It is the same as a company has more money than they need – may do some stupid things.

  5. Actually, with that little bit of support and encouragement from GN, I will add the confession that it sometimes drives me crazy when blogs I read regularly and have become “used to” change their format. I figure it’s because, no matter how I pride myself on being flexible, accommodating, and willing to “learn new tricks”, I’m really getting old and “set in my ways”. I like your current format because it’s simple to understand, and not “cluttered”.

    Sounds like you have a mandate to use your time here developing additional content, instead of fooling around with a format change :-)

    And I also agree with GN on one other very important point…get better soon!

  6. By the way, if you are interested in making the site a little bit “prettier”… just by playing with the colors a bit and text spacing etc… I’d like to offer a pair of hands+some thoughts… drop me a note;-)

  7. @GN, not interested in changing color and format. It was not changed in the last few years. The longer the blog last, the fewer reason to change it, because it is already part of the blog identity.

  8. a suggestion: it will be better for readers to find an article easily if you can add a assortment according to the date of all your articles. because sometimes it’s a little difficult to find an article according to the content assortment.

    tks.

    happy mid-autumn day!

    Allen

  9. Allen, I do have a date based archive – one page for every month, just not as easily accessible as the content archive. I will add it to the homepage.

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