Full post disclosure
Most websites only show a fragment of the posts, not revealing the entire post unless you drill down into the header link or the “read more”. This was one of the first things that I modified into RenEvo to be easier to read new content for the visitors. I could see if you are depending on ad exposure separating the topics from the news would give you additional points of advertising, but since I don’t do either, there is no reason to just show the visitor the entire post.
Simple Posts
Facebook has this ideal notion of showing “mini-posts” or “Simple Posts”, there will be times on my site when I don’t want to sit down and add an entire post, but maybe just want to post up an interesting tech video I saw somewhere, or other Facebook functionality. Yes, I am stealing this idea, but this is my site, I get what I want.
Filterable Homepage
Because I will be adding different types of posts, it is only natural that I will need someway to display only certain things on my site. Facebook does this pretty cool like by adding filters on the users Home tab that allows them to only show individual posts by type, or a “News Feed” that shows everything. Just by adding this I will easily be able to combine multiple parts of my wanted functionality all on the home page.
Visitor Bug Reporting
Sometimes I can’t test everything on every browser both logged in and anonymous, so providing some sort of bug reporting and feedback mechanism would be ideal way for the visitors to let me know where I goofed up.
Dynamically Load Older Posts
Not taking it as far as the Google Reader methodology that reloads all the content as you scroll down, Facebook again has the ability to load the next (x) amount of older posts on demand, allowing a visitor to catch up on content.
Inline Commenting and Liking
As a way for me to allow visitors to say something about my posts easily, as well as let me know if the crap I am posting on the site is even worth my efforts, or possibly allow me to statistically analyze what content I could concentrate on more, the Like and inline commenting option both above on Facebook and below on Stackoverflow would be ideal.
Although I would want to go a bit further and allow a user to post more information, kind of like how codinghorror.com does it, I would allow users to enter their name and “optional” email ONLY for hashing and used for generating a Gravatar avatar image. This way people could easily brand their own comments, but antonymous would still be able to be kept.
Tag Based RSS Feeds
Stackoverflow has the ability to create feeds based on their tags. Essentially any feed that is created on their website can be accessed via a feed. Say you don’t care about my home life that I post about, but you are fascinated with my car, you can simply just subscribe to items tagged “Charlie” – the name of my car…
Easy and Quick Adding of Content
Again, going on the idea of me being able to update this site as easily as possible, there will not always be times when I want to open up Live Writer to build a post, so I can easily go to any browser, sign in with my OpenId, and quickly add a new link, video, or quick text about what I am wanting to say.
Auto-Update Networking Sites
Because I will not want to go through and double add content from my site, to Facebook, to twitter, to RenEvo, to… I will be using Networking API software to directly post content based on tags and type. For example if I post a video, it will also share it on Facebook, if I just plop in some quick text, it will also update my twitter and Facebook pages. If I post a blog and tag it with Renevo then it will automatically post to RenEvo.com. Features like this will easily allow me to stop jumping all around the internet to post information, I will only need to go to Facebook to see what everyone else is doing.
Personal About Page
Taking from the guidelines to create a great “About Me” page from Smashing Magazine, I want to create an about page that is kind of personal, rather than “hi, i am tom, i do stuff… *to-do update this later” I really like this one as it shows the person with a full body shot on the page, and some clean information about him.
That pretty much wraps up this part, I think that the next step might be doing some quick preliminary chicken scratches of how I want the main page to look and flow. Stay tuned.