A thoughtful reader pointed out that Steven and my posts didn’t have sig lines, making it hard to tell them apart. I’d assumed the system automatically turned those on when I added Steven as an author and didn’t notice that this wasn’t the case. They’ve now been turned on. Thanks for pointing it out!
The right hand bar has been loading a little slower than I like, so I’ve turned off the links to the recommended books, though they’ll be back in the future.
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
View all posts by Jimmy Akin
Regarding the bylines, perhaps with a bit of HTML work you could put a headshot thumbnail photo up near the title. It’s a trick I used when folks couldn’t tell if it was me, my daughter, or my sister writing on our weblog. At times they didn’t want to wait until they got to the bottom of the entry to read the byline. You need small jpeg images named after your authors. Then you tell MovableType/TypePad ‘s templates that you want something like $MTEntryAuthor$.jpg. It may take a bit o’ work to get the layout right, but it definitely makes things a bit more intuitive.
Regarding the booklist, if you have any way to ‘staticize’ the content so that it is local on your site as static text or images, it will be much faster than referencing content from outside. Besides having to depending on the uptime and bandwidth of the outside service, it also requires a visitor’s web browser to establish a new net connection to the outside site which takes longer than continuing the usage of the existing connection to your site.