A New Front Page and A More Complete Picture

The analytics software I run on this site has led me to conclude I have three kinds of readers:

1. Those who know me personally, and are interested in what I have to say.
2. Those who I haven't met, but have been referred to me and want to know more.
3. Those who are just interested in a specific post, which they've found through a search engine.
   

I've been frustrated for some time by the blog format of this site, because I felt it didn't do enough for the first two kinds of readers (the third kind don't seem to need any help). By coming here or subscribing here, the first two reader types are just seeing one part of my information stream; the rest of the data is on services they may not be using and hence is lost to them. When I'm thinking about a particular trend or technology, I'm sharing links on it, commenting on others who are talking about it, and tweeting short ideas. Those who read just my related blog post are getting only a fraction of the information I'm trying to share.

So I've changed the front page (http://amiablecoder.com) into a FriendFeed powered stream of information. I'm still going to post entries to my blog, but they'll show up in the stream mixed in with links, comments I make on other sites, and conversations I'm having outside elsewhere. In short, it should be a much more complete picture, with more content and more frequent updates. I've updated the subscription options to allow you to subscribe the whole feed, but I've left the existing blog RSS feed alone. I'm not going to force anyone to change who doesn't want to.

There's still a long way to go before I'm satisfied. Right now I'm most distracted by the fact that only the blog is searchable, and that the only ordering mechanism available is chronological (which I mentioned before isn't ideal). I will keep working on those issues and some of the other ideas I have, but for today I'm quite pleased. I think this is a step in the right direction.