The other day I was reading Ryan Tomayko’s blog and I got inspired.

Ryan wrote the Kid templating library which drives this blog, and is quite the Python/Ruby hacker. He also has a very minimalist design. Its principles are outlined here.

With hypertext, the information itself is the interface. The content takes center stage while the chrome and tool areas are placed in the back-seat. This inversion of priorities has created as big a leap in interface innovation as the first graphical user interfaces did to the terminal based applications before them.

And yet, these fine attributes of hypertext are regularly subverted. Since the web’s inception and subsequent boom, people have been trying to get around hypertext’s “limitations” as an interface medium: first with Java Applets and Active X controls, later with Flash sites, and today with Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms. There was a time when sites were authored with the goal of preventing the vertical scroll-bar from ever appearing! The goal is always the same: invert the web’s superior content-oriented interface back to the GUI era and allow for the types of administrative debris so common and accepted in desktop applications.

I have applied them over on my other channel. (I also made a bunch of other improvements, like per-tag RSS feeds, and better 404 handling.)

I often have rude things to say about other people’s usability, so it feels good to get my own house in order. I am interested though in whether there such a thing as best practice design for blogs. For example, are “recent comments” widgets useful? Should you have whole articles rather than excerpts on your home page, and if so, how many? I don’t know, but I’d like to.

Naturally, this blog is still untouched and looks like pus; in fact owing to changes made for the other channel, it’s worse than before. This will not be the case for long.