Rotundus and links

One thing that I've left Rotundus with over the last years is a fairly minimalistic appearance. Generally speaking there are posts, polls, and comments and that's been about it. There was at one time a collection of links to websites which vanished during the migration from PHPNuke to Drupal.

I'm sort of wondering if you like the site as is, or if you think that I should make some changes to things. One of the things that I've been thinking about doing is enabling profile pictures (eg. as seen on eg. my xanga site) just to add a little something to the site beyond plain text.

Another thing that I've been thinking about is bringing back the links page, or perhaps adding a few things to the sidebar. At the moment there are a few sites linking here, but at present the only outgoing links are those found in posts. There are also no links to places like my photo gallery.

Another reason to consider adding some links is that this website occasionally attracts people that seem to be searching for more than info on TV shows and the like. I seem to get oodles of queries related to the end of a certain TV show (and a surprising number of people seem to Google for locomotive numbers). I'm not too concerned about that. This site also seems to attract a reasonable chunk of theologically oriented search queries. This post on the emerging church seems to be attracting a reasonable amount of attention. I've also had a few queries from people looking for charismatic churches in Calgary - never any for reformed or presbyterian churches though. For these latter classes of queries I wonder if a few additional links might be useful to orient the folks launching these queries.

Comments

Pictures?

Pros:
More visually appealing
More interesting to read (people tend to read in chunks and pictures kind of separate things a bit, less text)

Cons:
Longer time to load
Picture hosting that might fail or not work properly / expired links

That's all I can think of right now.

I'm not sure on the idea of pictures. Having a small (250 x 250?) photo on a separate "profile" page would be one thing, but I like the simple, clean layout of Rotundus. I see some message boards where everyone has an avatar (of varying sizes), plus a whole pile of crap in a signature, and it just makes for a messy, ugly page that takes significantly longer to read.

I'm not crazy...oh, wait, nevermind.

I'll second that.

So you'd prefer something more like a member directory? (There are a few inactive user accounts, so I'd probably whip this up as a custom page instead).

Would consistently sized profile pics be ok? What do you think of the size of the profile pics on Xanga? (on the main page versus on the comment pages)

A member directory would be good. Having a profile pic on the main page, versus the comments, would be better. I'm not sure on the size given how rarely I visit Xanga.

I'm not crazy...oh, wait, nevermind.