I’ve done a bit of reorganizing to the sidebar, in an effort to group things together a bit more logically, and move sections that are more likely to be used closer to the top (above the ‘fold’, ‘Above the fold’ is a carryover from newspaper publishing. In print terms, it just means that the most important items should be on the top half of the page, so that they are seen when the paper is folded and lying face up. It’s the same concept on the web, only the ‘fold’ in this case is considered to be the bottom border of the visible area when the page first loads at a standard resolution (usually 800px by 600px).so to speak).
I decided to start off with the more ‘interactive’ elements — ‘Music of the moment’ and the most recent comments. While ‘MotM’ isn’t really interactive, the voyeuristic aspect to it has some of the same feel (at least, that’s my justification for keeping it towards the top).
After that we have the search form and the archives list, as they’re both related to finding older information, or information elsewhere on the site. The search form is one of those things that’s commonly ‘supposed to be’ above the fold, anyway, so this helps. Also, I’ve taken the calendar display off of the archive list. I’d debated its usefullness before, but finally made up my mind to remove it after reading Jonathan’s reasons for removing the calendar on his site (which I stumbled onto thanks to Burningbird).
Next come all the various links to other places to go, the Amazon voluntary paybox (which would be just as useful if I put it on an entirely seperate page with some horridly dry, academic-sounding title not likely to interest anyone, named the file something else entirely [and misspelled it to boot], and then didn’t post any links to it anywhere — but that’s another matter alltogether), the syndication link (almost as useless as the Amazon box, except that I occasionally use it for testing purposes), and the linkback to MovableType.
And, that’s about it for now. Woohoo?