Number of articles on the front page

[Feirefiz]

First of all, the new update is looking good.

I have a small question or a comment on the front page.

If I understand things correctly then the actual frontpage shows only articles from the current issue - currently four of them. The older articles are found in the Archives.

I don't know but completely exchanging the articles so quickly seems, well, wasteful. It's easy to overlook the Archives page and it would be a shame to let the previous articles be forgotten so soon.

One possible solution would be to let the front page grow longer. I wouldn't see anything wrong with that but I guess it depends on how important you consider a clean separation between the individual issues. A different solution would be a post before (i.e. at the bottom of) a new issue that is a kind of digest of the previous issue or some other form of more prominent link.

[pepperlandgirl]

Ultimately, I don't like the cluttered way the front page looks if I leave more than 4 articles on the front. Between the Archives and the Front Page forum, I think that there's still plenty of opportunity to find the older articles. This month, we had our grand debut with updates every week. I doubt we'll maintain that posting rate after October. It's hard to scare up that much material. I'll probably go back to posting on the 1st and the 15th, so the articles will be there for twice as long.

[Zuul]

I was considering this myself, since the archive is easy to overlook. A couple of thoughts I'd had about helping to promote older stuff:

• Having a menu on one of the sidebars with older, popular articles listed there. Pros are that this will make it easy for people to find those articles again. Cons are that this would make it easy to overlook other articles.

• Adding links to other related articles at the end of each article. Something along the lines of, "If you like this, you may be interested in this article or this thread" Pros are that this helps link people up with content they'll be interested in. Cons are that those threads may not remain active.

• Having a digest at the bottom of the main page, like you suggested. Pros are that this gets more material coverage. Cons are simply that it would take editing every week or so, which wouldn't be that difficult.

Ultimately, what I'd like to do is incorporate all three ideas. By linking articles and threads together so that it's easy to surf from article to article to thread, it'll keep front page browsers around longer and make it easier for them to find things they're interested in.

It's just a bit slow-going getting all of my ideas together, since there're only so many hours in the day. I still need to make a style sheet for the newer versions of IE, too. Any further ideas and suggestions related to layout are welcome, though preferably before this weekend which is when I'll (hopefully) be getting around to this. I may be rather crabby about suggestions while I'm elbow deep in design.