Twittering “Two Weirdoes” (Crosspost)

[Cross-posted from the blog at echristopherclark.com]

I am very busy at the day job today, but on my breaks from work I’ll be twittering the entire text of “Two Weirdoes, a Shovel, and Lots of Open Land,” which I discussed on Making the Book the other day.

The Twitter version of “Two Weirdoes” starts here.

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Half-Blood Prince Movie Stills

As I mentioned, way back in the third Geek Force FiveCast ever, Harry Potter was very nearly a member of my Geek Force Five. So, it should come as no surprise that I am good and thoroughly geeked out about the new batch of Half-Blood Prince promotional stills that popped up recently on The Leaky Cauldron. My favorite, which I’ve included above, shows us director David Yates planning a scene between Harry (Dan Radcliffe) and Ginny (Bonnie Wright). I don’t think I’ve mentioned this online before, but I once planned to write an essay on the relationship between these two characters and how it was telegraphed by Rowling from the very first book.

Yeah, I am an über-Potter geek.

These photos accompanied a “first look” USA Today article that appeared last week. 

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The Pluto Tapes - Live at SomerVaudeville (Video)

Eventually, I will get off my ass and separate this show by The Pluto Tapes into four pieces, one for each song, which is what I promised my friend Andy Hicks I would do about a month ago. But, for now, I think it is imperative that you all take a look at this awesome show that Andy put on as part of May’s inaugural SomerVaudeville event. If you have time for nothing else, skip directly to the end, to the tag for “Paula Abdul"/"Straight Up”. If that isn’t the most rocking Paula Abdul cover you’ve ever heard, then there’s something wrong with you.

Also, if you’re looking for something to listen to and you don’t already own it, buy a copy of Dead Planets Tell No Tales, the first album by The Pluto Tapes, on iTunes.

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A Few Notes on the New Look

Last night, I launched a redesign of geekforcefive.com. (If you’re reading this by RSS, please come over and check it out.) This morning, I wanted to take a couple of minutes to explain the rationale behind some of the changes I made.

Here’s what I was hoping to accomplish with this redesign.

1. Make the site easier to read by adding more white space
2. Make important navigational elements easier to access
3. Use “advertising” space more wisely

White Space
To accomplish my first goal, the first thing I did was drastically reduce the size of the header image. While I loved featuring Spidey and Silent Bob and all the rest so predominantly, the header image dominated the screen too much. It also took a long time to load, all things considered. So, I chopped the thing in half and came up with a much thinner compromise.

The next decision I made was to reduce the layout from a cramped three-column design to a more spacious two-column design. I repurposed the design I used for echristopherclark.com and changed the color scheme.

By doing those two things, I was able to add a lot more white space into the design. The end-result is that the Website is a lot easier to read.

Navigation
When I designed the first version of geekforcefive.com, I forgot to add space for a search box. That oversight has haunted me ever since. Sure, I was able to pop one in at the bottom of the page, but it was hidden away and I’m sure that hardly anyone thought to look down there for it. I know that I sometimes forgot where it was, so that’s saying something.

So, my first concern with navigation was to make sure the search box was easy to find. I also wanted the links to each news category higher up on the page. And I wanted the link to the about page (previously visitable only by clicking the picture of me in the old sidebar) to be easier to find.

I threw the search box and the category navigation into a horizontal navigation bar, right underneath the new, thinner header, and that part was taken care of. Then, I added a brief blurb to the top of the social networking box that I borrowed from echristopherclark.com, and linked that up to the about page to solve problem #2.

Advertise Wisely
One of the biggest decisions I had to make was what to do about advertising. Since its inception, geekforcefive.com has featured Google AdSense ads in the sidebar. They haven’t done all that well for me, so I decided to scrap them from the sidebar altogether. There were better things I could do with that space, I decided. If I was going to advertise something, why not advertise my book? And why not move the donations box out from the bottom of the sidebar to near the top? It had done more business for me in four months than Google AdSense has done in two years. How much more business might it bring in just by being more visible?

I decided to keep Google ads on the individual article pages by throwing in a horizontal box between the body of the article and the comments section, where I’d occasionally posted them before. We’ll see how that goes. Maybe now that they’re back in the flow of things, they’ll be more useful to readers.

While making my decisions on this front, I spent quite a bit of time reading Colin Devroe’s posts on how he uses advertising.

A Couple More Things...
I decided to put a Share This link on every article page, because it was criminal that I wasn’t making it easy for readers to share my work on their favorite social networking sites.

I also decided to use Gravatar.com to throw avatars into the comments section. I thought that’d be a fun touch. I know not a lot of you visitors are using Gravatar yet, but you should be. It’s dead simple and all it takes is a photo and an e-mail address.

Comments and questions are welcome below.

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Worth Your Consideration 007 - A GF5 Linkdump

• News Askew is reporting that NBC will re-air Saturday Night Live’s inaugural episode this Saturday night, an episode which was hosted by the recently departed George Carlin. The classic episode will apparently be aired in its entirety, which, according to News Askew, doesn’t happen all that often on NBC.
• I’m embedding George Carlin’s take on the Ten Commandments above because it’s criminal that I didn’t embed something of his when I posted my initial thoughts on his passing.
• On a much lighter note, Gary Vaynerchuk has posted the episode of Wine Library TV that was filmed in Boston recently, an episode that I made it into the city to see last week. I think it’s a perfect “entrance” episode for anyone who is mildly interested in wine and in seeing what Gary does. There’s a great blend of humor, education, and flat-out thunder here.
• Apple will apparently be releasing a free remote control application for iPhone and iPod Touch users which will allow them to control iTunes from anywhere in their house. This is something I’ve seen quite a few people clamoring for on the Apple boards across the Web. The real key, for me, and for a lot of others, will be if this works with the Apple TV. I loves me my simple two-button Apple TV remote, but it would be nice to have something a little more robust when I needed it.
• Lastly, for the comic book fans out there, be sure to check out Newsarama’s poll of what titles the pros think we consumers are missing. The Walking Dead, which Brandice recommended to me recently is one book that gets mentioned as a must-read.

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