Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

trail-bound

At work this morning we launched a new Politics blog centered around the campaign trail and the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. The Trail will feature regular updates and analysis from the Post’s political staff, as well as promote all the big campaign-related multimedia, interactive and enterprise work being done at the Post and post.com.

I served in a design and production role on this project, designing the overall layout and then implementing it within our templates in Movable Type.

We’re taking a different approach with the blog format with this project. The challenge with blogs, in the traditional sense, is that it’s a strictly time-based hierarchy, where posts are pushed further and further down the page as new material comes in. The worry, then, is that the stronger posts that might otherwise have a longer shelf life get pushed aside in favor of newer material that, while interesting, may not be as important.

To address that, we’re featuring those longer-shelf-life items in the main content area of the blog index page, and all the other running updates in the left sidebar. This distinction is only present on the blog index page; the RSS feeds and archive pages still display all entries, regardless of import, in the typical blog format — sorted by the time/date they were published.

Anyway, it’s worth keeping an eye on. The posts thus far have been pretty lively / interesting (last night’s debate offered plenty of blogfodder).