Tips/Help/Advice for redoing my blog

[morrysillusion]

Hello! Been a hot minute since I was here and I am currently... uh, "de-making" my website, basically just redoing the entire thing and keeping it in its simplest form before I focus on the visual design, because I want to make sure it functions right before it looks pretty. My code is quite old and bad now that I have learned more and I havent had time to fix it so I am just redoing it all! Anyways--

I am trying to remake my personal blog currently, I want it to be functional and readable first before other stuff. You can see it here, but I will explain how it works in order to compare that to how i want it to work on the new version..

The old one has a sidebar with iframe links on the left. the center box loads the linked doc in that iframe (...am i wording that right? see it yourself and youll know what i mean lol). It also has the special frame link so i can link the specific articles on the blog too.

So, while redoing all this I am wondering... is there any more efficient methods? I can't really decide as I find the way I do it to be a bit tedious but, maybe thats just how it has to be lol. Or any other suggestions on laying out a blog page in general. I would like to have a main page with the list of recent blogs, which then lead to a lone blog entry page, but that wouldn't be an iframe thing, right? theyd have to all have seperate pages with the same layout/format/css?

the first remake i have made is this-- pretty simple to show with just this screenshot i think (ignore what text says "blog" or "links" thats not where things will go exactly.


It would be nice to have this page with the blog links and then keep the same look on every other blog page.

but i am concerned on doing this because of 1) having full copies of every single page with its own css and all-- should i be using one css file across all of the pages to ensure they stay the same look wise? but most important.... 2) i will have to redo ALL my blogs wont i lol? theyre all bare text files for the current version. there wont be any easy way around having to re-copy and paste and reformat every single one i assume?

if anyone has tips or ideas let me know!! been very indecisive on how to do about my new blog page tbh...

[shevek]

It would be nice to have this page with the blog links and then keep the same look on every other blog page.

I don't know if this would 100% fit your needs, but maybe looking at how smol.pub handles it would work for you or inspire you (seeing how things like that can be designed and be uniform and simple).
It has the blog page showing a list of blog entries (or more, if you wanna put more there) and if you click on the blog entry, it shows the entry and they all look the same.
m15o also offers the HTML blog option, which shows how you can format blog posts to show up in this format and also, after validation, offer a way for people to subscribe to it. "View an example blog" might be helpful for you there.

These are the two things I immediately thought of in how to design a minimalist blog structure and formatting. One css file to link would make sense, I think. And I guess it would be true that you either have to edit the existing blog entries or recopy them in other files, yes.
But I hope someone else might have other ideas too :)

[morrysillusion]

thanks! i hadnt actually seen those two options before so i appreciate it. i have seen other blog set ups for websites people have used but i just havent liked how they sounded with how simple i want to keep mine in the end.... i will definitely look at both of these, hopefully one will work for me!