I’ve been thinking about link exposure as I work on the microblog list template. I mentioned before that having redundant links is preferable to having redundant content, and that’s part of my Single Page design philosophy. I’ve been thinking about the category/tag pages (term pages in Hugo), and if and how to break those out or change them. Vertical space is infinite in a webpage so one can easily list every microblog page, of which there are hundreds, and displaying mood icons and tags may help distinguish these, but I still wonder if the list need exist at all or display more than say 10 posts.
Link exposure is a way to expose the content of a site so it is easy to find. You can do it with a sitemap too. But it assumes a) it makes sense to bombard people with a page of links and b) people need access to every page at any point. Link exposure theoretically makes it easier for people to find things of interest or more convenient to navigate pages and that’s how we ended up with design elements like navbars on every page, there is an assumption that from any given page in the site the reader might want to go to any other page without returning home.
The alternative is what I’ll call an Iceberg Site which means there is a lot of unexposed content beneath the surface that is discovered during the course of exploration. Since I primarily use my front page links and the tag/categories to find things, I think I’m leaning more toward an Iceberg. The microblog, at least, is becoming more self-contained as I removed the navbars and put the emphasis on navigating post-to-post.
Also, I made my first custom cactus kaoani! I’ve been wanting to modify the “computer off” to have a basic “working at computer” for a while now. I would still love to know who created the cactus kaoani, if anyone knows the answer to that.