EVula's Blog

Brainstorming about the Lair

I'm going to be doing a small update to the site in the next few days (hopefully early next week). It'll just cover minor stuff, like replacing all the PNG files with JPGs (which will have the dual purpose of reducing a bit of load).

I'm also going to redo the front page. The more I see it, the less and less pleased I am with it as it currently stands. :\ I think I'll go back to my previous layout of having the six most recent Rants and Reviews spread out horizontally; with the much shorter descriptions (which are now the first 33 words of the article, rather than the totally arbitrary amount it used to be), it doesn't work too well to have them all vertical. This also means I'll probably switch back to a two-column listing of jokes.

Depending on how much time I have, I might add some more content to the site (hopefully I'll have time to write a review of something).

For future updates, something that I want to do is rate all the content on the site (though it only really only be seen on a few pages, like the Jokes and Rants). Everything would get rated either G, PG, PG-13, or R. There would be two things that would change depending on the content rating:

• Every page will have an ICRA rating embedded in the source code. How does this affect you? It doesn't! I just want to be complete, and I'm a big fan of self-rating my site than having someone else rate it.
• With every page (or, more importantly, just the PG-13 and R stuff) labeled, I can "fine tune" some of the advertising. Specifically, I can comfortably add banners for "off-color" sites and restrict them to only pages whose content is PG-13 or R. That doesn't mean that I'm going to start having porn banners on the site (believe me, that won't happen), but I would like to have banners for stuff that could possibly be considered "not family friendly."

Though the content rating sounds like it could be a pain in the ass, it really won't be hard; the system will assume something is G-rated unless it is told otherwise, so I won't have to worry about getting every page, just the more profane stuff (and that only generally happens in Rants and Reviews, both of which have preliminary $content_rating values in place).

I'd also like to expand purchasing options on the Review pages. Nothing crazy, like having a thousand different merchants, but possibly supporting other people than Amazon.com. Dunno, what other stores do you think I should sign up with? I've thought about maybe TowerRecords.com and/or Overstock.com. It all depends on their respective affiliate programs, I suppose. Down the road, after I unleash one of my in-development <cryptic grin>s, I'd like for users to specify which vendor (out of a list) they use, and then have the site automatically generate the purchasing links based on that data. However, like I said, that's a ways down the road.

Another thing I'd like to do is have a "pros and cons" area at the end of each Review that would just sum up, surprise surprise, the pros and cons of whatever is being rated. I still need to fool around with the formatting with it, though, before I start implementing it.

Anyway, I'm just tossing out some ideas for ways to improve what I've got so far. If you've got any ideas, don't hesitate to post them; sure, the Lair is my site, but I'm doing it for my kick-ass users, so speak up and help make the Lair even better. :)

Posted by Eric at June 15, 2005 04:09 PM