In my previous poetry blog, where I had written mostly structured poetry, I had convoluted the Home page and each post so much that one would barely even notice the poetry. There were click throughs to posts, with dates between which the poems were written, notes for myself and no one else who probably cared for them, lots of categorizations and tags shown, among many other features with each post or on the home page. the complete opposite of that other blog, I have decided to make this blog almost as bare as could be to leave the focus on the writing.
In this poetry blog, showcasing my new, unstructured poetry that is the exact opposite in form to my old poetry, I have made the design the exact opposite of the old poetry blog. I have made it almost as bare as could be, except for some navigation features and a few widgets for following and sharing my content.
No Poetry Posts to Click Through On
Every poem is shown in its entirety, without additional content for anyone to have to click on a post to see more. This drastically reduces my traffic count, and doesn’t really let me know which poems are being viewed if someone could read a dozen at a time on the home or search results page. However, I like that simplicity like finding a small stack of index cards laid out on a table for the reader to just browse over, and go on to another table if they wanted to see more. It also reduces the interaction during the poetry reading experience. Occasionally, I will add a little essay to reminisce or discuss some related topic, where I will then truncate the post’s visibility to the size of an average poem posted so as not to warp the layout with one long post. Otherwise, you shouldn’t have to click through on any post to read it all.
No Notes
The notes I had included with each post in my old blog was a terrible use of time. While it is nice if I ever cared to look back, which I am not generally prone to do, I highly doubt anyone cared for it. I wrote those notes because I had generally regretted not being able to find more from authors of poems I had liked, as they had left no notes, and I didn’t want to do the same. However, now, I value the extra time to spend on other things, and being a little bit of a mystery in case anyone ever wanted to know more about some poems. If it intrigued them enough, they could always leave a comment. Otherwise, I’ll just leave the poem as it is and focus on writing more poems rather than writing notes hardly anyone would ever read. I’ll also be content to be a mystery unto myself if later in life, I look back and wonder what the heck was I thinking???
No Dates Shown
The dates over which a poem was composed was just my compulsion for order and complete documentation. Given the short poems I tend to write, a date span of more than one day could be equivalent to a significant chunk of the length of some of my poems! Visually, it is distracting, and if no one really cared but me, then why even show it? Besides, with the unstructured poetry seen here, rarely is a lot of time spent on crafting the final version since it doesn’t have to be wordsmithed to fit into a form. Most poems would have been composed on the day they were posted, and those that were not, it would have likely been no more than a few days’ total from idea initiation to poem completion. That I am willing to ignore, with the posted date on my Posts board behind the scenes to have that actually documented somewhere.
No Categorization or Tags Shown
This template is able to hide categorizations of posts, and tags associated with posts, which is really nice because it lets me do the same thing as with other templates, without showing it to distract the reader from the pure poetry reading experience. The categorizations I can mostly hide in the menu bar at the top if viewed on a monitor, and in a menu with choices if viewed on a mobile device. They will help readers navigate and find similar poems so they have a valid purpose. But until the navigation is needed by the reader, they don’t have to see much of it, if at all, to help leave the poetry reading experience purer.
It really is a bare bones blog and I hope you like it
microbursts 