Classic posts now available from sysmango.com

For you reading entertainment, if you scroll down to the bottom of the main page, you will notice a new section: Classic _underscore posts. This section contains a selection of my favorite posts from the history of sysmango.com. What makes a post Classic? Classic posts are the ones where maybe the attempt at humor didn't fall flat on its face. Maybe my choice of a turn of phrase didn't end up tying the post into an incomprehensible knot of strangely constructed English. Maybe I achieved a moment of comprehension, clarity, poignancy and maybe even relevance that still conveyed a slight echo of what I intended to do when I sat down and wrote something. Or maybe the post was just so very bad that I recently rewrote it and am using the Classic tag to obfuscate what really happened.

Actually this is the realization of an early design idea I had a long time ago.

Shortly after I started sysmango.com and the _underscore blog, I thought it would be interesting to have a sidebar item where I had links to what I thought were best content in this website. This was an idea I had around the site's first blogiversary. I had a short list (three, if I remember) posts that I thought were still really very interesting. I did realize that most people did not want to click on things to get to content, unless it was a really long article. And those of you who are reading via syndication would never have seen it. Also, I knew of no way of doing it automatically via MovableType, which I was using up until recently. As I have been reviewing the possibilities of a number of Drupal modules, one module caught my attention, Node Queue. One of the features is to show a list of links to all the items in the queue. That would handle the original idea, but people would still need to click on the links. Another mode of the module randomly selects an item from the queue and shows it, in its entirety. Add that to the ability to place blocks in any region defined by the theme, and one gets what I am doing with Classic Posts. Every time someone loads the sysmango.com front page, they will be presented with a randomly selected post that I have selected, at the very bottom of the page. This is the bit about me being a little bit evil. I am going to make you scroll past the newer stuff if you want to see it. Maybe later, I'll change the page to put a link down to the bottom. Another possible change is see if any voting thing exposes actions for the Actions module, let readers vote on which articles should be Classics.