It wasn’t until I started hacking at this iPhone theme that I realized an odd thing about WordPress themes:
Almost everyone includes massive sidebars in their themes, filled with stuff that nobody ever uses. What do I mean? Well, as mx pointed out (though not online, I think), the sidebar is the ultimate vanity. Although he went on about this at some length with antipode, I was mostly left to think through the implications on my own.
It’s true. Most people who will read this post are either already my friends, have been linked to a post, or have found the post through a search engine because I mentioned something really obscure. The number of people who will want to see my archives is vanishingly small. So I don’t want to waste main page space.
So where do we put it? Well, I’ve noticed that the people who don’t put this stuff in a sidebar typically include a link to their archives, a link to their tag map, etc, etc. Why? If someone’s interested, why can’t I include all of that information? Isn’t that information, in a nutshell, what the blog is really about?
So instead of putting all that junk in a sidebar or in separate pages, I’ve put it in a single page. I’m not really happy with “archives” as a name for this, but it’ll do until I pinpoint exactly what this page really is. Maybe it’s just “other postings.”