@ Doug N: Thanks for the thoughtful reply and helpful resource. And you’re right about “disclaimers” … what I meant is better named “statement of purpose.”

@ Tim: I’ve experienced what you’re talking about with the idea queue, and sometimes that’s fine. I’m currently unemployed and just waiting for my house to sell, so I might get “multi-postal” over the next few weeks. I’ve been chipping away at my own sidebars over the last few days and *think* I’ve about got ‘em right. Finding the balance between providing useful resources easily and presenting a pleasing sight can be difficult sometimes.

But then there have been times when I’ve written four or five posts in a day. Sometimes I just get a lot of ideas queued up and then find the time to do something with them all. I don’t guarantee the quality (or the grammar), however.

As to the sidebar, it’s like I teach the people in my web publishing classes. Too much stuff and people just ignore most of it, or get confused and go somewhere else.

At this point, I’m reluctant to mess with the format because I’m afraid of alienating people or screwing something up that readers might like, even if I don’t. It might be similar to the thinking that goes into a major change in personal appearance (wardrobe, hairstyle, etc), wondering how people will react. In the end I like the advice I got from Graham Wegner when I started looking for a new blog template. In so many words, he said that first you have to please yourself. There are a couple of things that I’d like to change on my own blog, but I don’t know whether they’re important enough to deal with.

I’ll try to tackle some of the questions you’ve asked, applying my current thinking (as opposed to what I’m currently doing.)

The sidebar: I used to have a Recent Comments section, and a Top 10 hits list. I liked those things, and when I put the new template in, I disabled those plugins and never reactivated them. I want to turn those things back on, and need to hunt through the files for my old template to see where the code that does those things is located. The blogroll is something that I’m thinking of taking off the blog, and just including a link to. It’s already just a list on del.icio.us that displays on the blog. I wonder if it slows the page loads too much. There are other more political sites that I’ve started reading, and I’d like to share those links, too. But the blogroll is all (or mostly) education-related teacher sites. There are so many more teachers blogging now than there were when I began, and my reading habits have changed, how do we acknowledge that dynamic condition in a blogroll? It could require constant maintenance.

Post length: I work hard to keep my posts around 750 words, or less. I find that very hard to do. One of the problems is that when I want to contextualize a point I’m trying to make, I tend to quote from another source I’ve linked to. This feels excessive sometimes, and I wonder just where to draw the line on when, and how much to quote. The other thing I try to do is to stick to one main point, rather than throwing all my ideas about something into a post. Again, I’m not always as successful as I wish I was with this.

Frequency of posting: I’ve fallen down with this, lately, and I know why. For one thing, reading stuff on the internet – especially the political sites I’ve begun to read – has started me thinking about things that I don’t know a whole lot about. So I’ve been doing a lot more reading than writing. I’ve also learned to be a little bit more careful about what I say. This isn’t necessarily a good thing because I probably self-edit too much as I compose, and I fear I may lose some spontaneity in the process. Still, I don’t want to look back over stuff I’ve written and feel like I was an irresponsible idiot for saying something. So I post less frequently, and try to avoid feeling like I’m on a schedule. Two posts a week sounds about right. I’d like to post more often, but that’s hard to manage with a job and a family.

The feed: I publish everything in one feed. Having a separate blog for different subjects seems like a good idea. In any case, I don’t think that we should avoid including personal information because it might not be “interesting.” Point of view is necessary for making sense of the information we get from blogs. As I said in my comment on Doug Belshaw’s post, Personal stuff is OK, if the person is interesting. No matter what a blog is about, I think that bloggers need to develop a sense of boundary for what they write. Not only is it a matter of privacy, but also one of coherence for readers, and this is involves judgments that every blogger has to make on their own.

Disclaimers: I don’t think that personal blogs need disclaimers so much as they should have statements of purpose. It’s a assumed, I think, that blogs are personal statements. We don’t issue disclaimers all the time when we talk, after all. However, I do think that corporate blogs, or blogs that are commercially sponsored, or represent an organization of some kind, should say so up front. After reading Stephen Downes’ article, I put together an About page as a way of clarifying my purpose in blogging. It was as much for me as it was for visitors to the site, and it was a good exercise. A lot of people have come to the blog because of that page. I even re-read it recently, and it helped me to clarify my thinking about something. One thing that I do think a blogger should absolutely have on the front page of their blog is their name. Whether it’s their real name, or a nickname. It’s good for other people who want to leave comments or mention your blog to know what to call you.