Blog redesign continues...

I have finished the new layout homepage ( index.php for those of you who have built Wordpress themes ) and the right navigation ( sidebar.php ), but I hit a bit of a stumbling block.

The “about” page.

This seems to be a section of a site where the person who writes the site tells you what they already expect that you know about them.

This works like so for famous ( or blog-famous ) people.

If you’re Jeff Atwood this is where Jeff says “I’m Jeff and I know a lot about C#” or if you’re at ‘joelonsoftware.com’, it’s where you go “Hm, yes, Joel, I knew that about you, that’s why I"m reading your site.

For people who are famous on the Internets for being masters at topic X or Y, this page usually is just a reminder of why you visited their site in the first place. Akin to, say, Einstein’s about page saying something like “I did a lot of the early research in generalized relativity.”

For the rest of the masses ( yours truly included ) people who find your site usually do so by knowing you as “link #4 on google for my search for ‘bcr collection agency’”. For these people, should they wish to buy you a drink or send you sexy IMs, you like to provide some autobiographical background ( so that they know not to try to slip you a mickey in a vodka, versus a whiskey ).

Normally, most people have a hard time writing content for this section. “Do I talk about how girls didn’t talk to me”, or “Do I talk about the time I got pantsed in gym” ( neither of these things actually happened to me, thankfully )? That’s challenging, I agree.

What’s really driving me nuts is that since my code redesign is largely layout-oriented, how do you make a bio page visually interesting. They’ll all follow the Dickensian I was born… arc up to the present, but what format to put what you put in, in? A bunch of unordered lists? Little squares? Drop-downs?

Meta