The Blog Layout: Opinions Wanted

One of the mysteries of blogging for me is what layout is the most useful to readers visiting From the Sidelines. As a result, I'm always tinkering with what's presented with only some feedback from trial and error showing vague patterns in analytics. Also a factor is a desire to make the blog load faster on smartphones and tablets.

Since people rarely used the category tags to look for related posts, I used the page function on Blogger to make index pages though it wasn't meant for that usage. It was a rare dramatic success at improving the site and they get used far more than expected.

Over the years, I've eliminated some things such as links to other blogs since nobody ever clicked on them. Right now there are a couple of sidebar items that I'm thinking of axing. One is the Hall of Fame and the other is the Most Read Recently. Both use Blogger widgets that are not accurate thanks to referral spammers.

An example of that distortion is my review of Varan the Unbelievable. According to Blogger, it has 769 pageviews. From StatCounter and Google Analytics, I can tell you it doesn't even have a tenth of that! So there it sits at the top of Most Read Recently at the time of writing at this post and it should not be there.

UPDATED:  They're gone. The ghost hits on Varan got out of control today, so something is seriously wrong with Blogger statistics. Google has really failed badly at making those work correctly which is slightly ridiculous given what their forte is supposed to be.

Because of this, I'm looking for some input from visitors to this blog. What part of the layout here do you look at and use?

I've added a contact form to make it easier to answer if you don't want to publicly post and it can be found at the bottom of the right sidebar. Please feel free to comment here too. I'm very curious about what works and doesn't work for you here.