6 thoughts on “For TA: What I see when I click on my author name in the footer of my posts”
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The Secret Reading Room (test site)
An International Bookish Community
An International Bookish Community
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Ah. Mystery solved, thank you! It shows as a mini-bio at the top of your author feed, and at the bottom of the posts you create.
Essentially, then, this is the kind of thing that would show at the top of people’s individual blog rolls on BL (if they chose to fill in that field in setting up their blogs, that is).
We can definitely go with that to start with, but I can foresee people — maybe not everybody, but some — asking for / trying to create more eventually, and I’d like to keep a handle on this from the start rather than things sprouting wildly and then playing catch-up.
I can see that. I’m inclined to vote for a Page setup, with the list of community users indexed and linked to their own page. That way it can be up to the user to turn on/off comments on the page, and it keeps projects purely book related.
What are your thoughts about organization of non-book themes? Do we organise them beyond people tagging them ‘gardening’ or ‘tea’ or ‘food’? My thinking is no, though I’m not invested in that no. As common as these type of posts are they probably still don’t take up more than 10% of the total, at a rough guess.
If people tag them accordingly, each tag creates a feed for all the posts tagged with it anyway (that you access by clicking on the tag) — for purposes of organization, that should be enough, and I don’t want to regulate people’s behavior overly much. (Group reads may be a different matter, at least if we revive any of the BL groups, e.g. “Discworld” or “Flat Book Society”; but we can easily create categories and menus for those along the same basic lines of my Halloween Bingo test menu.)
What about adding a tag cloud in the sidebar, though? It doesn’t really make sense here — or hasn’t so far — because we’re hardly using any tags here I noticed; but if people keep using, say, “cooking”, “food”, “gardening” or whatever for those types of non-book posts, they would easily be able to access those feeds via the relevant tags in the tag cloud, because all frequently-used tags would invariably show up there. (They’d still have the tags themselves at the bottom of each post in addition to get to the same feed, of course, for all the tags of less frequent usage.)
I had the tag cloud on my site for awhile and I ended up ditching it because it took up too much of my menu bar and I never used it.
Saying that, it’s a different thing on a group site; it’ll still take up a lot of room, but it might be super handy for everyone wanting to access tag feeds for non-book posts.
Yes, that was my thought, too. I’d still stick it at the very bottom of the sidebar (that’s where it resides on my blog as well) — but it’s a fun way of keeping an eye on what tags (arguably: themes / topics) people write about most, and on LT, for example, I’ve recently started to use the tag clouds associated with individual books rather frequently as shortcuts to similar books (same on BL for finding certain posts or types of posts or organizing my sub-blog’s sidebar menu); so I’ve definitely learned to appreciate tags as helpful shortcuts.
I think in a group environment, I’ll appreciate having it too.