Jeff Jarvis mentioned how stale blogs look. Specifically how they all seem to look the same, with their one page format. While there are various categories and tags which relate to different subjects within a blog. But it's all organized in a list format on a single page. Shouldn't there different ways of diaplaying information? 'Course and newsaper design is good base for looking at how to different information on one "page".

So I did a extremely rough layout of what that might look like, using the categories from my blog. It’s all info from the same blog, but each box is limited to a single category and it only shows one entry from that category. This presents a problem with entries tagged with multiple categories though, like in that second row. The same entry appears twice, because seperate boxes are tagged to display only “music” or only “media”. But that entry was tagged Music AND Media, so it appears twice. Also, the different lengths of the entries pushes the design (laid out via tables) outta whack. The full url format also throws off the width of columsn and thus the design. Pictures would pose another problem, and where the text goes around the picture. Even if the design was more professional looking, it would still be limited by this exact format. Someone would need to relayout this “page” on some annual basis, be it daily, weekly or whatever and that’s currently quite a task in web design.

A lot of the common tools for doing page layout aren’t available on the web, stuff like multiple colums (Yeah, I know CSS 3 is supposed to handle that, but it’s still a couple of years off), being able to easily layout a age in an EXACT way or baring that a way for boxes/colums/rows etc to flex to the display device in a format that’s reads across all browswers.

So, yeah, the single page list format is getting old, but IT’S EASY for now and someone upthread mentioned, it’s easier for people to adjust formatting quirks than it is for software to adjust us at the moment.

Or perhaps not. Check out the mixed columns and rows category at cssdrive.com