Richard MacManus’s blog uses the mullet layout to excellent effect. Read/write web actually has two blogs within it. His linkblog (ideas.readwriteweb.com) is a classic mullet. The top seven stories displaying links and excerpts, and the next eight just displaying links. His main blog (www.readwriteweb.com) uses a modified mullet that has anchor links at the top of the page, as well as shorter links at the bottom for older entries. This is a nice touch: the addition of the anchor links means that links to the top 5 stories are always “above the fold” on the front page. I dub it “the sandwich”.
4 thoughts on “MulletWatch 2005: Read/Write Mullet”
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jonathanboutelle.com 
Lose the sandwich name. Stay with the hair metaphor. Its appropriate and there are some good ideas in the comments to your previous mullet story (http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2005/08/mulletstyle_blo.html)
“the Skater (bowl-top, shaved sides): a layout without left nor right navigation.
the Beatles-cut (sides down to the jaw-line): a layout with both left and right nav.
the Buzz-cut: a layout without a formal or visual header, nor left and right nav.
the Beard: a layout with a visual prominent footer
the Bee-Hive: a layout with an oversized header”
I’m sorry to say, but my linkblog is a faux-mullet. The effect you describe (“top seven stories displaying links and excerpts, and the next eight just displaying links”) was created by a couple of transitions I made recently. I was testing out Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 as a linkblog, but found (to my horror) that it did not include the ‘description’ tag in its RSS. That explains the last 8 links that have no description. So I returned to good old delicious, which faithfully displays both link *and* description. Anyway, I now use FeedDigest to create the main linkblog page – and currently you see both the old MyYahoo and new delicious links on that page. Thus the faux-mullet effect.
As for my main blog, well I’m flattered you consider it a mullet. I used to have summaries for the first 10 entries, then the mullet links at the bottom of the page. But I found I had problems with Technorati and other search engines not updating my blog (they often use the frontpage to gather their links – altho Technorati has since fixed that and uses the RSS feed too now). So I went back to the sandwich effect you describe above.
cheers,
Ha! The faux-mullet sounds like a perfect example of the visual design mishaps that can happen in a web 2.0 world!
Sounds like you were using the mullet layout BEFORE it was cool. ;-> I like the sandwich layout, but the “stealth” aspect of the mullet layout really hooked me: I dig the way it looks completely vanilla until you start to scroll.
Nice name, Jon!
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