I blog too deep: The front page of my blog always holds the last 14 days of my posts. I reckon a fortnight is about right to give any new reader a flavour of a newly-discovered website. But leave too many posts on your front page and you're wasting your time. Almost nobody ever reads down to the bottom of the page, they just read the most recent top stuff, but all those unseen old posts still lurk underneath wasting valuable loading time (and valuable bandwidth). How full frontal were the blogs in my survey?
a) 20 blogs from my blogroll: It's like going back in time, reading some blog front pages. Last weekend my blog took you back a fortnight, to October 24th, but approximately half of my blogroll went back even further than that. Threeblogsin particular were still displaying a September post right at the bottom of the front page, not because of infrequent blogging but because these people wait a long time to archive their older posts. And then there was Annie's front page which included a massive 37 posts, many packed with photos, and which therefore took me more than a minute to download. But Blue Witch's extended front page held a full 47 posts stretching back more than a month - I wonder whether anybody was still reading the 47th? b) The 10 most recent blogs to link to me: Yet again, very similar results to the above. About half went back further than me, with three still showing September (and, in one case, wa-ay back to September 4th). c) The 10 biggest blogs in the world: Whereas, being prolific buggers, this bunch barely went back any days at all. Nigh all November-only, in fact. And, for one high-turnaround megablog, the ten posts on the front page were all from 'today'. d) 10 utterly random Blogger blogs: Most of this lot still have the Blogger default of precisely 7 posts on their front page. But they post rather less frequently than the groups above, so I was able to time travel back to August, July or even June.
Conclusion: I reckon a fortnight's depth on my front page is probably about right, but when I'm photograph-heavy maybe a little shallower would be better. How about you?
