Right now, there is no spot on Haiku Habits for others to leave their haiku, other than through comments. Several people have already left poems – sometimes inspired by the original post; sometimes improving the original – in various comments streams on this site.

Perhaps in the future, we will add a forum section, where others can post and critique, as you suggested.

Thanks again.

One of the reasons I think “examples” works as a keyword is because, as you may have noticed, I put out a new haiku for feedback and then make multiple changes that are tracked within the Comments section. These are works in progress as I receive feedback, and my skills develop. Sharing, commenting, and editing haiku can be a great exercise for all involved. Join in the development of your Haiku Habits!

Would perhaps the word ‘exercise’ would work better for what you use it as? It’s not so much that you are providing examples for others to emulate, but instead you and your audience get to work together to exercise poetic muscles.

I’ll get to work on better Human Interface Optimization (HIO!) pronto.

Thanks again!

Regarding community – I envision setting up a forum on the site to allow people to post/talk about haiku, but conventional wisdom is to wait until you have more visitors. A forum needs committed stewards. Interested? I’ll post a survey soon to see if interest in a forum is there.

Although I agree it probably wouldn’t work to regularly have others post their own haiku here, I came across this site http://5seven5.com which does appear to focus on just that. I think Guest Posts will work well on Haiku Habits, however, including shared haiku.

Nice find with the rengay. I’ll check it out.

Okay, time for a disclaimer: I’m far from experienced with SEO or HIO, but I’m an attentive user of blogs and I’ve read a lot about blog design and thought about it for my own blog. I know it’s difficult to balance between a clean interface and one that’s got everything that’s needed. And I respect what you’re doing here, and will randomly offer advice when it seems warranted (or when I’m procrastinating doing something I need to be doing — whoops!)

I think once there are comments lining the left side, the page will look really busy. There are some navigation tools missing from the sidebars as well, and I see they are actually way at the bottom of the page. Or maybe that was just a bug — it seems to be gone now.

You definitely don’t want to make it difficult for people to find your links to Subscribe, ditto for your Search field, and especially ditto on the Categories! I, personally, love categories and tags. Every blog I visit, I always check out what’s going on in one or two categories and/or one or two tags, just out of curiosity. For haiku in particular, I’d think categories or tags would be even more important than the search field, but you never know, and so both should be very accessible. (Edit: the bug that got me earlier seems to be fixed, and this stuff IS easy to find on the right sidebar. Hmm.)

So, I would strongly suggest not having so much emphasis on displaying the links to recent comments, and instead having navigation tools nearer to the top. How to arrange them on the page depends on some HIO: human interface optimization (an acronym I may have just invented), rather than SEO. Take a look at what the sidebars look like when the post is a short one, and try to tweak them so the sides look balanced. Examine how long each sidebar extends down the page, but also look at the visual “weight” of the elements — pictures are heavier than underlined links, which are heavier than plain words. Put some heavy stuff on each side.

Also consider the F-pattern: this is the way the human eye tends to look at a webpage. Whatever you put in the top left-hand corner will be what is seen first. Actually, after awhile the header will be getting ignored, and the most seen will be the top left-hand corner below the header, followed by the whole line below the header, followed by the top right-hand corner. Consider those spots for your twitter and RSS and subscribe options, and maybe your most recent posts. Try a few ways, and try and pretend you’re a newcomer to your own site — where would you want to go next?

About this being a community site: it still feels much like a Ken Wagner site. Don’t get me wrong, that is okay by me, and maybe it wouldn’t even work to get dozens of people all submitting haiku of very different styles, and commenting on each other. It is something to think about though.

On a different note, I’ve been thinking it might be fun to get some play-element in. How about making some rengay?

rengay link one
rengay link two
rengay link pdf