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More on Feevy

I’ve been affectionately challenged to put the feevy feed on the front page and see what happens and, in the spirit of yesterday’s post about Rick Rubin’s exhortations to keep an open mind, I’ve put them up on the sidebar. I know they don’t line up quite right, my sidebar is a wee bit too skinny for them, but other than that, play along and give some feedback — cool? gets you reading stuff you didn’t plan to? distracting? makes the site way more social? jeez Nancy, who let all those other authors in? What do you think?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 8:21 AM
and filed under Uncategorized.

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Comments (8) to “More on Feevy”

  1. david silver wrote:

    nice! let’s see what happens. nice sense of experimentation!

    Posted on 21-Feb-07 at 9:29 am | Permalink

  2. Madeline wrote:

    I’m biased, if only because I’m lucky enough to have a site in the blogroll! (Also, if you have a chance to look at the “fandom closet” post, I’d be grateful. I’d like your opinion.) I think there’s nothing wrong with experimenting inside a template, and if you have a problem with the sidebar, it should be easy to re-set the parameters with a “width = X” or something similar. It’s always fun to look at the bones of one’s CSS once in a while.

    Posted on 21-Feb-07 at 12:53 pm | Permalink

  3. michael newman wrote:

    Since my words are now on your blog, I thought it would be a good time to de-lurk here in your comments. My feelings about feevy are mixed. I love RSS as a concept that allows users to do what they want with web content. I’m not sure I love the way feevy puts feeds in a blog, though. The words don’t have enough context for me, b/c their authors generally didn’t envision them being used this way. I have to consider three bits of info to make any sense of each feevy entry–blog name, headline, intro. This is a lot to process at once, esp when a blog’s name isn’t familiar or when the blog’s content isn’t instantly conjured by its name (which I think is true of many if not most blogs). A headline/link might work better for me than the beginning of each post but this might not work either as there still is no widely accepted convention of using appropriately descriptive headlines in blogs (though some very au courant sites, like Boing Boing, are leading the way here). Maybe if feevy and similar RSS apps catch on they will change the way we blog to adapt to new functions. But since most people don’t yet blog with RSS remixing in mind, this sidebar content can be a little confusing. Maybe this is just me, though.

    This is a great blog, Nancy, and I look forward to more of your thought-provoking ideas and experiments.

    Posted on 21-Feb-07 at 1:44 pm | Permalink

  4. Alx wrote:

    From a french point of view, your blog is awasome, thanks to make us discover this great new service.

    Posted on 21-Feb-07 at 6:18 pm | Permalink

  5. Slivka wrote:

    I think I´m with Michael Newman, that the authors didn´t write their posts and imagined them being published in this way. And from a designer´s point of view, it pollutes the sidebar an awful lot. There are some bugs happening too (on a pc, haven´t check on a mac yet), the headline and the text gets mashed up.

    Maybe if one css:ed the typography smaller it wouldn´t be as “polluting”, but on the other hand that would lessen the readibility. Catch 22, innit? ;)

    Posted on 22-Feb-07 at 5:11 am | Permalink

  6. David wrote:

    Hi Slivka, we use to advice make feevy wide enough. Sharing your house with your friends is great… but don’t make them all sit in a tiny armchair. Make them feel comfortable and conversation will flow better.

    The easy way is not to personalize it and, as David Silver did, to use the preformated black feevy. But if you use the liquid skin is very convenient having width enaugh in your bar and, if needed, add to your CSS feevy classes.

    Posted on 22-Feb-07 at 11:27 am | Permalink

  7. Nancy Baym wrote:

    Thanks for the comments (and praise too!). Personally, I’m visually not sure about it — it’s a lot of information to process and I think it’s visually distracting. BUT here are 2 interesting things:

    – incoming links from the 2 sites that have me in feevy feeds (we’ll call them “the Davids”) have been my top incoming links

    – the number of outgoing links from the site quadrupled instantly, people started clicking on them as soon as they were in the sidebar.

    Posted on 22-Feb-07 at 1:16 pm | Permalink

  8. David wrote:

    We have changed liquid default settings… i think it looks better in your blog now, Nancy :-)

    Thanks for helping us to improve!

    Posted on 23-Feb-07 at 6:23 am | Permalink