Blogs are great, but they suck part 2: In which I remake the face of the earth

Big news: I'm creating a new blogging platform based on the principles I outlined in Blogs are great, but the suck (part 1).

While that post covered some specific problems with blog archives, my new platform has a broader goal. The use case I'm concerned with is this:

You just stumbled upon a blog you like (either via stumbleupon.com or a legacy stumbling platform). Now what?

Well, one thing you can do is make sure you'll read future updates by subscribing to its RSS feed. Google Reader solves this problem quite nicely.

However, unless the blog's posts have a short shelf-life (e.g., politics, celebrity gossip, etc -- you probably shouldn't be reading this shit anyway. If something isn't going to be interesting to you in 6 months, it probably isn't that interesting now; you're just bored. This is why I don't read the economist, but I digress!) you probably want to read some of the blog's already-published content as well. Unfortunately, this is impossible.

One "solution" is to peruse the blog's archives. I sounded off at length in part 1 about how frustrating this is, so I'll only summarize the issue here:

A blog archive is merely a labor-intensive mechanism for picking a random blog post to read.

Here's the workflow: pick a year at random (with the slight anxietythat you're doing something wrong), pick a month at random (same anxiety), read a post at random. Repeat.

There's nothing wrong with reading posts at random, but why should it be so difficult?

Take a look at http://randomdelino.heroku.com -- this simple site shows you a random delino post every time you click a button, and despite ostensibly having less functionality, it's strictly better than the delino archives.

So fine, users of my new blogging platform will have the ability to see a random post. What else will it do?

The spec

Here are the basic ideas:

• Break up blog posts into useful chunks.
• Provide good sorting for those chunks.
• No pagination (or, more broadly, don't make the user request content).
  

Chunks

Each blog will have the following sections:

• A section displaying all posts (default).
• A "best of" section. Originally I called this "starred posts", but I've decided that Web 2.0's obsession with "starring" is insane.
  
• A section containing only longer posts
  
• A section containing only shorter posts ("quick hits")

Sorting

Every section above can be sorted in the following ways:

• Newest first
• Oldest first
• Shuffle (i.e., randomize every time you click)
• Posts with more comments first.

No Pagination

As I wrote in Part 1, when I'm done reading your blog, I'll leave. If I'm still around after reaching the bottom of a page, obviously I want more content -- don't make me click "Older Posts" to get it! There are two strategies for killing pagination:

1. Expandable Snippets. Put all the posts on a single page. Show full blog posts for the first 10 (or so), the first 200 words of the next 40 (or so), and just titles for the rest. Clicking any incomplete post expands it inline (quickly, I hope). This is roughly an enhanced version of Google Reader's "List View"
   
2. Endless Page. Show the first 10 posts in their entirety. When the user scrolls to the bottom, pull in the next 10 in their entirety automatically. This is roughly Google Reader's "Expanded View".

Which is better? The endless page model requires fewer clicks (though the user is likely scrolling with the mousewheel, and thus his hand is probably on the mouse already), but it's more jarring, doesn't give the user an indication of how many total posts there are, and frustrates in-page browser search.

Open Questions

• What's the best way to avoid pagination?
• How should the platform deal with posts meant to be read in series / together?
• Should readers be able to rate posts?
• Tags / Labels? Are these useful for anything besides jokes?
• What should I call this thing?