I don’t expect that most of my readers here will bother with browsing through archives just for the fun of it, so I already make available a couple of topic-related mechanisms to find what you’re looking for: the list of post tags (visualized in the image shown here), the category tree, the search form, the list of top-rated posts, etc.

Today I’m introducing another way to get to my core content, an index of my signature blog posts. This is a list of my more substantial and well-considered essays on a variety of topics, and I think it represents well the thinking and writing I’ve done on topics I’m passionate about. I’ll try to keep it updated regularly, and I hope you find it useful.

1. I’m now using Gravatars – “globally recognized avatars” – to display user-uploaded images next to the comments that people post. This creates a little bit better sense that you’re interacting with real humans, and even adds a dash of color. If you want to try it out, just visit gravatar.com to upload your avatar today.
2. You can now choose to be e-mailed about follow-up responses to a particular post that you comment on. While you can always subscribe to a post’s RSS feed to track comments, sometimes getting an e-mail is the easiest way to go – and don’t worry, you can just as easily unsubscribe too.
3. Some time ago, I added a post rating system to the blog, allowing you to indicate what you think on a scale of 1 to 5 stars (5 being the best, of course). Posts with high ratings get a little more attention elsewhere on the blog, and each star you add also help an angel get its wings. It’s a way to give feedback without typing out a comment – “thank you for helping us serve you better.”
4. Also added some time ago, but now more prominently featured, you can see posts that are related to a new blog entry, listed right below the entry itself. I tend to circle around some similar themes, and so this is at least a helpful way for me to see how things tie together; I hope it’s a useful way for you to explore my other writings too.

There ya go. Let me know how this stuff works for you; as always, this space is a work in progress.

I recently tried an experiment, where I took a couple of my blog postings from here, and cross-posted them on an account at Daily Kos. As a result, I got to learn about the strange culture that’s evolved on this headline-making site. For example, a posting there is actually called a “Diary” (not a diary entry, just a diary). And there’s apparently a whole crew of users of the site who go through reading the hundreds of diaries posted throughout the day, and they “Rescue” them, which means they highlight them for the rest of the users of the site to read. Apparently, I hit the Kosian jackpot of having my first two diaries ever rescued and discussed. Most interesting was how many people commented on the entries compared to their life on this site. I suppose that when you’ve built a critical mass in an online community, the content gets a lot more attention, no matter its quality.

Anyway, it was fun to know that a site read (and often condemned) by various national political and media figures had, for a brief time, a little linkage to my self-indulgent ramblings.

Now, slackers, how come I can’t get 33 of you to comment on a blog post here?

So I’m turning to tagging and tags, a fairly widespread component of many blogs these days. Basically, each post will be assigned a series of tags that help describe it, and they’ll be listed on the post page when you view it on my site (currently located in the right-hand column on each full post page). You can then click on a tag to see other posts that share that tag and are, presumably, related. For example, this post will have tags of “[tag]blog[/tag]“, “[tag]meta[/tag]“, “[tag]website_development[/tag]” and “[tag]blogging[/tag]“, and you can click on any of those to see other articles that share those tags.

I’ve also added a “tag cloud” to the navigation bar on the front page of my weblog, which shows the most often-used tags. A similar display is now present on the front page of my site. Soon, I will also add an index of sorts that identifies some themes in my writing, composed of groups of related tags. Eventually, I hope to fade out the use of the traditional category system.

Let me know if you find this useful, confusing, or something else entirely.

The image at the top is a stylized version of a photo of me. I’m standing in a fast-moving river, creating a disturbance and sloshing around me, as I look up at a beautiful sky in a moment of peace.

But here, sometimes you get a thoughtful treatise on social security, but that might be followed by a silly post about something that happened on my back porch. Based on my understanding of weblog culture, this means that people who only want to be bothered with the “good stuff” are going to be less likely to subscribe to my RSS feed, visit my site on a regular basis, start or follow a comment conversation here, etc. The result is that I’m left with folks who happen to be passing through, or those friends and family who have enough time and interest to stay tuned in.

Solutions? I could separate out the substantial articles from some of the more miscellaneous personal things – a new weblog?, better category separation?, etc. I could just post more often and with more vigor. I could redesign the site with more bells and whistles, tags, digg links, etc. I could decide that I don’t care if I don’t have a consistent audience here, and I’ll just write a book if I want to explore a certain topic in a focused way. I could…

Any thoughts?