Instead of publishing, I have spend some time thinking about my site. The trigger was the article Stinky links by Matt Haughey. At that moment I had just created my FeedBurner feed combining my posts with my Flickr photo's and my linkdump, and I knew that I had done something wrong. Readers following me because of my Movable Type writings are probably not interested in my holiday photo's, and people who want to know about my life abroad don't want to be bothered by my link dump. This site has a lack of focus, and I only made it worse.
The feed readers have the biggest problem, since they don't see the context of each entry. On the home page, my ‘normal’ entries take up the bulk of the space, the links are shown in the sidebar, and the latest photo is shown in the sidebar as well. People who read my feed, don't see the context; the three content types appear in exactly the same way. To solve this, I am going to offer three more feeds: one for my weblog, one for the links and one for the photos. They will be added to the current everything-in-one feed, to give my readers more choice.
Once the biggest problem has been solved, I want to restructure the links section. My main problem is the category structure, since I find it increasingly difficult to correctly place the items. I have to review the existing categories and their items, and will probably start using a tree structure with sub-categories.
Next, I want to split the weblog part in two parts: a web–tech site and a personal site.
First I will have to find out how to move certain categories from one weblog to another, but a little bit of SQL-fu should do, right? To link everything together I would like to change my homepage to a gateway to the different parts of the Brain tags empire. I guess this would also be the right moment for a new stylesheet, as I am getting fed up with light blue as well.
Once all that work has been done I want to start a new site, focused on a subject I work on every day, but which does not show up often on weblogs: point of sale software and hardware. I still have to work out my ideas on this subject, and I want to talk it over with some people, since it comes awfully close to a business weblog, but I think it would add something to the current blogosphere.
These are my ideas on the near future of Brain Tags. What is your opinion? Am I right, or should I go in another direction? I would like to hear and read your opinions.
[Update 2005.02.17]: The first step has been taken. I added a new feed for the photo's: http://feeds.feedburner.com/brainpics.
