After living with the blogroll on the home page of Scripting News for about a month, and having heard from early testers, I felt that it was demanding too much attention when I was reading stuff on the blog. So I made some time last week to experiment with a subtler sidebar.#
In Quiet Mode, the blogroll doesn't call attention to itself until you click on it. Then its background changes from neutral to white. That's the equivalent of shining a spotlight on it. Also the borders become blue to indicate that the browser's focus is on the blogroll.#
I wanted to do more to tone it down. So, in Quiet Mode the title moves up and to the left, and is in a much smaller font, boldface, nicely visible and stands off from the list, but doesn't call your attention to it. It's there when you want to know more. #
You may want to call it something other than a blogroll, btw. If you're using blogs to coordinate projects with others, something I think a lot more people would do if it worked better, instead of "blogroll" you'd might call it your "workgroup."#
Anyway, I have switched Scripting News over to the new quiet mode, it's already the default, but I put a checkbox just below the blogroll that lets you toggle between the two modes to see the difference and possibly spot problems. The checkbox will go away before long. I just want it there to quickly do an A-B comparison. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
