In many cases, a good design is as important as the content.  You can take the lamest thing and wrap a snappy logo design around it, and it immediately gains appeal and possesses some sort of credibility, albeit superfluous.   Take the Spice Girls for instance.

Similarly, a fantastic idea shrouded in bad form or not marketed correctly might not ever get taken seriously.  Take Betamax for instance.

This concept of uplifting style above substance is one of humanty’s Big Flaws.  We do it all the time - commercials, religions, personal image, writing, products we buy, and portions of everything we can touch and see.  In today’s busy world, we naturally gravitate to the stylish because it’s simply too much work to sift through all the dirt and noise and actually discern the quality content from the crap that surrounds us.

When a thing can *mean* something significant (substance) and look fabulous doing it (style), you then have something worth your time.

But is substance and style enough?  I think not.  I think there is something to be said for functionality as well.  Although there is a saying that goes “anything worthwhile doing requires effort” it doesn’t mean we can’t make things easier on ourselves.

It is with these concepts in mind that I bring you…. The begbar.

It’s conveniently placed above this and every post, right there at the top of the page.  The blog of whall now offers 24×7 begging.

It’s got the substance (pleas for help or assistance), it’s got the style (oooh, so suave and sexy!) and it’s got the functionality (it’s right there at the top and you just click on the item(s) you care about).

Most blogs have certain staples that hold them together - a header and footer, for example.  Most also sport various ‘bars’ like the sidebar, a navbar, a toolbar, a linkbar, and in some exceptional cases, an open bar (where is that link again?). I thought about calling this the “plea-bar” but I thought someone might make fun of it (plea bar again, anyone?)

I hereby populate my inaugural begbar with my latest lolacola submission beg for votes and my pepsistuff codes beg button.

“Help me… help you… help me.”

Visit the begbar and use it often. For the whall you save might be, well, me!

I recently saw ClusterMaps ClustrMaps on another blog and thought it was kinda cool.  I installed it yesterday and its starting to show some hits already

If it’s not already painfully obvious, the system tracks, to the best of its knowledge, the location of the visitor and puts it up on a map (see the little red dots on North America?).  It’ll be interesting to see what it graphs as my IP, because I’m in Austin but when at work, my internet address looks like it comes from Dallas and when I’m at home it probably looks like Austin.   

I’ve put it down in my sidebar for now, and the dots are more obvious

It also got me thinking about my sidebar.  Well, not so much thinking, but getting a little self-conscious.  My search function has been broken longer than Ted Kennedy’s been a senator, and I bet no-one uses the calendar at all.  Then I have those other areas that right now only show the RSS feeds and a “recent comments” listing.

I’m partial to a Tag Cloud maybe, or some kind of category lister, and maybe some way to rank posts so I can show most popular or highest ranked.  Any suggestions here?

What do YOU like to see on people’s sidebars?