I've always wanted my AgilityNerd blog to serve as a reference for interesting dog agility subjects. Consequently, I'm interested in making it as easy as possible for readers to locate, explore, and learn more about the sport. So improving navigation is a strong interest to me.
I have been reading Designing Web Navigation by James Kalbach. In the section discussing Browser Mechanisms Kalbach discusses the back and forward buttons and the Session History drop down. The session history is usually a menu that drops down from the back button (or near it). It lists the pages the user has visited in reverse order showing their page titles. Kalbach states: "Session history is a good reason to supply meaningful browser titles". That reminded me that for my blog the session history has always just displayed "AgilityNerd" for each page visited on my site. I was leaving out a valuable aid to my readers who use the session history to find where they had been previously.
Another benefit of setting the title in pages is in tracking site statistics. It had always bothered me that GoogleAnalytics never showed statistics for my pages by page title.
So these two things finally moved me to take some action. I had been thinking about writing a Blosxom plugin to set the title element in the HTML head section but I've always been too busy. Luckily I didn't have to.
I found out about the storytitle plugin from Nick Leverton's Serendipity blog. He had made some changes and released version 0.7 of the plugin. It was trivial to setup, I just followed the directions in the plugin and had this site and agilitynerd.com/blog working within minutes.
So if you are a Blosxom user just grab this plugin. Otherwise, take the time to set your page title sections so you can help your readers and help analyzing your own site's statistics