I agree. Tom

I agree with CVIlle Dem that the sidebar should return. I think that front-paging highl-scoring blogs in some way, whether more in a sidebar or fewer in the center, would encourage people to frequent them. The best score, I think, would be a combination of recommendations and new comments, and I think making this clear would naturally encourage more people to rate and comment.

I would resist tying promotion to short-term relevance. I often prefer the topical freedom of writing blog entries rather than discussion table posts, and I enjoy reading the blogs for their variety.

I read them, write them, recommend them.

I like Mr. Foo's idea, that some combination of recs and comments within a certain period of time would "bounce" that post to the featured list.

Would it make sense to have a "featured" list, that combined both the Discussions and Blogs? That is, regardless of either or, the posts that are either newly posted from the Disc queues *or* have lots of recs/comments are highlighted on the front page?

Dissent Protects Democracy.

Could we have a separate tab for reader blogs? A chronological list of blogs could be shown on one side. But maybe only show the title and author, so more of them could be shown on one page (or perhaps reduce the number of lines of text to, say, three or four rather than up to 9 as we have now). Perhaps there could be some button to click for the reader to decide if the blog listing should be organized according to date or by number of recommendations. The other side of the page could be organized more or less as the front page of the Cafe is now, with selected articles showing more information. I think more people would read them if it were organized this way.

This would be just a minor variation of the sidebar scheme. The sidebar does encourage more to read them, but is very haphazard in terms of how long a blog happens to appear there - several people writing blog entries at the same time can push a good piece down into oblivion.

As it is now, like CVilleDem, my tendency is to read them primarily when I see them on the current sidebar on the Comment page (although often not there either, as once one clicks "Post Comment" they disappear). I don't think confining their content to current or timely discussions is necessary or desirable - we have the Discussion Tables for that.

I'm a little puzzled by your comment about a "button above":

Do you read them (button above) or write on them?

I don't see any button for blogs anywhere. I know when I was using the Opera browser a while ago the top row of tabs didn't appear (there were two rows then). Could I be having a similar problem with firefox now?

I notice you're asking a lot of questions about what it's like to use TPM Cafe, Andrew. I appreciate the interest.

Know your enemy well, for in the end that is who you become. ~~Old Chinese Proverb

First things first. Get rid of some these boring liberal has-beens hogging the front page. What's-the-guy's name from Columbia wrote

There is a button immediately to the right of the TPM Cafe logo. It is the same color as the background but does have a discernable border. The text reads: "Reader Blogs: Everything under the sun" clicking on the text should do it.

To answer the question, no I don't read the Reader Blogs. There are only so many hours in the day and I prefer to take my chances getting some attention from people who are listened to. One comment coming to the attention of Josh or MattY or DeLong or Sawicky has that much more chance of passing through to effect the actual policy, while working at the layer below that by using a Reader Blog or writing Diaries seems a little pointless. After all anyone can have their own blog (I have two - one totally inactive, the other static) and point back to it.

Of course there are risks of mixing it up with the Big Dogs, because you can look awful stupid awful fast. Trust me on that one.

Bruce: Thanks for your reply, but the button doesn't show up - not on the main page, nor any other page. I'm thinking perhaps it's a browser issue related to my use of Firefox and not IE. (I do happen to have a link I bookmarked long ago that will get me to the reader blog page.)

Now I'm kinda wondering if there are other things I'm missing. Could this be happening to others who use Firefox? Andrew, I hope you notice this.

Know your enemy well, for in the end that is who you become.~~Old Chinese Proverb

Andrew, I also wanted to mention that I like how you've been asking questions in these open threads. I think it's a great idea. I liked the "lurkers" post -- as a one-percenter, it was great to hear from so many new and/or unfamiliar people.

I wonder if in some of your open threads, you might call attention to some of the "hidden" features of this site. Or, at least ask if people know they exist. Like, for example, as long as you log in, you can keep up with the various conversations here with the "new" link that's next to all the posts.

Or, there's a "recent posts" link (here) that's called the "tracker," that shows every post that contains recent comments, as well as how long ago those comments were written.

Many people on the lurkers thread asked how many of us could comment in and follow everything that's going on at the site, and the "new" links and the "tracker" are two of the ways I've found that make it much easier to follow what's going on.

That, and of course, being independently wealthy and not having to work. (Kidding. DEFINITELY kidding...)

Dissent Protects Democracy.

I can see the coffee cup icon, "home" and "about." I can see only one row of tabs. Is that all there is? I know there used to be two rows of tabs, and in Opera I couldn't see the upper one (the one that had tabs for Supreme Court Watch, Yglesias, Bolton Watch, etc.), although I could see it in one version of Firefox (when I upgraded there was intermittant trouble with seeing the upper row of tabs). There is a light gray banner sort of shape where the second row of tabs used to be. All that it holds now though, is the coffee cup icon and as Jay describes him, "the guy with the pipe." Is that how it is for everyone?

I had presumed that with the re-design, we went back to only one row of tabs. It's hard to know if I'm missing anything else, for obvious reasons. :-)

Know your enemy well, for in the end that is who you become. ~~Old Chinese Proverb

I agree that the design is highly imperfect. For now, though, we just need to make sure what we are trying to present is showing up. Once we have the time and the money, the design here will more radically change.

How about a moratorium on bandwidth-hogging, or server-clogging, "improvements?"

This site has gotten S - L - O - W in recent days, while others I visit have not.

Wordie, your firefox view sounds different than my ff view. I made a screen clipping of the top of this page and posted it here if you want to see what mine looks like. (I think this will work.)

In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The way to expose the user blogs more widely that fits into the present design of the site is to have a "User Blogs" tab in the tab row, with the highest rated user blogs showing up in an "Overheard in the Coffee House" section in the left margin, picking up where "Overheard on the Blogs" leaves off.

I read the readers' blogs, and occasionally comment on them, when they appear on the front page.  I've been to the linked area, but not very often, because when I do get there what I find is pretty chaotic and also quite the mix of stuff from great to inane. I have a couple of suggestions which might send me looking more often.  I don't know how practical they are from a technical point of view, but here goes.

1. Turn the reader's blogs page into a simple blogroll, putting all the blogs on it in alphabetical order.  If possible use the same feature which you do to inform people of new comments (an indication that the poster has added new material since the last time the reader checked the blog).  This would be helpful to those of us who would like to follow one or more of the blogs we find useful, especially if the blogger doesn't post on a regular basis.
2. Currently the software allows three options to comments: reply, write to author, and link.  If a commenter is also a blogger, why not have a fourth link to the person's blog?
3. If I get a personal letter, I also get an e-mail announcing the same.  Would it be possible to create a similar system to allow us to track specific blogs?  In other words, if a person added something to his/her blog, I could choose to be notified thereof.
4. Is there a way to explore the possibility of group blogs on specific topics?  Some of us would like to join forces, perhaps, and thereby be able to maintain a blog about something dear to us without the pressure of having to come up with an essay with merit on a daily basis.  This might be something of a cross between the idea of discussion tables and blogs... reader generated and moderated discussion tables.

Thanks for the chance to add my two cents.  (Each of these is at least a half-cent idea).  :-)

aMike

amike: All of those ideas sound good.

I especially like your idea #2; it would be nice to be able to easily see if a blogger who one would like to read regularly had written anything new. It's only possible to do that now through a fairly laborious process.

I suggested earlier that there be a list of blog titles and authors on the main blog page that was sortable, so one could sort by date posted or by number of recommendations, but maybe adding author as a sort key would be good too. (Perhaps this idea would be difficult to program, but who knows, maybe Drupal already has a module that could do that easily.)

Know your enemy well, for in the end that is who you become. ~~Old Chinese Proverb

I have posted blog entries, only to have them roll off the main user blog page within a short time because others post shortly after me.  Your post can be not interesting and stay because no one else is inspired in the same timeframe, or it can be genius (mind you, that would not include mine) and disappear before anyone sees it.

I would suggest that Andrew select a blog that he likes and provide it some sort of priority locations once a day.  Also, the blogroll idea, seems good.  It might be possible to have some system of indicating how many unread posts are behind each link?   Andrew could selectively post blogs that he thinks are good to a priority page and the blogroll could be there?

When you suspect your blog will disappear after 45 minutes, you feel pretty discouraged about continuing to post. 

Seeing as how the America Abroad room has been abandoned by its former contributors, its tab might as well be given to the blog link. Such a change would give an ironically apt coup de grace to the collapse of that forum.

Bring back and keep Chalmers Johnson!

Tom

You might want to note that in the space of less than two hours tonight a user named CafeNow has become so inspired as to post 4 blogs, essentially crowding out all other blogs from the main user blog page.

Perhaps you should have a process that substitutes your new blog for your old one so that any particular user cannot have more than one blog on the main user blog page unless you, Andrew, decide to promote it there.