programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
I recently happened upon Tom Raftery's blog. I'm sure Tom's a great guy, but what's up with all the visual noise on his blog?
I count 24 pieces of flair in the bookmark section alone.
STAN I need to talk about your flair.JOANNA Really? I have 15 buttons on. I, uh, (shows him)
STAN Well, ok, 15 is minimum, ok?
JOANNA Ok.
STAN Now, it's up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum. Well, like Brian, for example, has 37 pieces of flair. And a terrific smile.
JOANNA Ok. Ok, you want me to wear more?
STAN Look. Joanna.
JOANNA Yeah.
STAN People can get a cheeseburger anywhere, ok? They come to Chotchkie's for the atmosphere and the attitude. That's what the flair's about. It's about fun.
I only recognized a few of these bookmark icons. For reference, here's the complete list of sites represented in that set of 16x16 icon noise:
The users of the above social bookmarking sites surely know how to bookmark a site without these "helpful" icons. Everyone else is befuddled by 24 meaningless icons.
And if you were thinking of subscribing to Tom's feed, he has you covered there too:
Why do people want their blogs to look like NASCAR vehicles?
Blogs work because they're simple. Adding a bunch of flair just makes them harder to navigate and more difficult to read.
Take Tom Sherman's blog, for example. Great content. But navigating his blog is painful:
I'd love to browse the rest of Tom's entries, but he's made it awfully difficult for me to do so.
And then there's Scott Mitchell's blog. Scott's a fantastic writer with a long history in ASP and ASP.NET. But do we really need to see those daily comment statistics and hourly hit statistics along the right side of the page? I'm sure Scott finds them interesting, but they're just noise to me.
Perhaps this is really an argument in favor of RSS-- all of the content with none of the excess flair.
Is it safe to conclude that the only person who does blogs right is you? :-)
mike on May 11, 2006 7:31 AMAbsolutely not!
But I do think everyone should take a long, hard look at their pages and remove any gratuitous buttons or images.
It's a bitmap Strunk White:
http://www.richlanguage.com/archives/the_editing_process.html
"A good editor can take any piece of writing, and compress it to at least two thirds of its original size without losing any meaning."
Jeff Atwood on May 11, 2006 7:46 AMAs someone who writes the code behind those little icons (the Newsgator ones - we call them "chiclets"), I've wondered about the efficacy as well.
It makes sense for the companies -- free marketing. But I just never really got why anyone would put one on their site/blog/whatever.
Oh, and I have to take exception with your closing comment, "all of the content with none of the excess flair". Most blog posts contain at best a fraction of the content. Many contain just a couple sentences, some just an image, some are a title and no description. Of course those are better than the ones that shove an entire HTML page, including CSS links, Javascript and tracking bugs into a post.
But I do appreciate you putting the entire post in there-- thanks Jeff!
Brian Reischl on May 11, 2006 8:30 AMI have always preferred "simple elegant" to "gaudy congested." I try to convey that in my web design, but I honestly wonder how successful I really am.
I totally agree about RSS...it's the only way to read blogs/sites! And I only recognized one of those little icons (del.icio.us). [shrug]
tod on May 11, 2006 8:56 AMI've got a few of the chiclets on my sidebar. One reason I included them is because they also add the feed to specific web based RSS aggregators. If a potential reader is using a client-side RSS reader, they can usually just click on the big RSS icon and the client app will take care of see that there is a feed and subscribe to it automagically (at least this is what happens using NetNewsWire). if the user wants to add the feed to their My Yahoo page....there really isn't any other way to do it other than a hyperlink. And a simple button that says "Add to My Yahoo" is probably easier than a set of instructions telling the user how to manually add the feed to their My Yahoo page.
Scott on May 11, 2006 8:58 AMAll the icons are generated by the WordPress plugin I wrote, a href="http://push.cx/sociable"Sociable/a. I've actually a href="http://push.cx/2006/sociable-is-the-new-black"already written/a about how godawful it can look and why I'm OK with that. And I plan on adding a couple dozen more social bookmarking sites, because it just gets funnier and funnier to me the more sites there are.
Peter Harkins on May 11, 2006 8:59 AMOK, and your blog helpfully stripped my links. So:
The plugin is at: http://push.cx/sociable
The post I mentioned is at: http://push.cx/2006/sociable-is-the-new-black
Jeff,
Thanks for taking the time to critique my site. I appreciate it and always want to make my site better. To respond to your individual points...
1. I tend to refrain from posting the full-text of entries on my index pages simply because I think it makes it harder to scan. It's a delicate balance. I don't do it for all posts. Perhaps I do it for too many. If a post has 2000 words, I don't want it taking up 5 screens and a reader not seeing the next post if that content doesn't interest them.
2. I've struggled with what to do with the Cited Sites and Linked Cites stuff, and may nix it altogether. I'll take your feedback under advisement. I know that it is low-value content, relatively speaking.
3. The fact that you can only view 15 more entries is because Movable Type is a pain in the butt. I have to have a separate template to call the "next 15 entries," offset from the entries on the main page. It's not dynamic as in most CMS's. I'm sure you understand my pain here.
4. Monthly archives are all contained on one page. For example, all of March 2006's entries are on one page: http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/03/index
In that sense, I'm not sure what you're saying here. Also, from that page you can move forward or backward a month.
tom sherman on May 11, 2006 9:31 AMOne other thing I should mention w.r.t. #1 -- I tend to assume that the most discriminating of readers -- and you would fall into that category -- are reading via RSS. I offer a full-text RSS feed, so you wouldn't have to worry about how I break up the text.
tom sherman on May 11, 2006 9:32 AMWRT RSS being "all of the content with none of the excess flair": after burning half the day reading your archives, I finally decided to add you to my RSS reader and get back to my list of chores.
I use a PHP-based reader (gregarius.net), and was amused to see "WTF" images everywhere in your feed... in this case, I'd have to say that the anti-linkjacking code makes your feed all the content with *negative* flair.
It's trivially easy to just open the entry in a new tab, though, so don't think this is a complaint. Just an amused comment... (=
Sam Livingston-Gray on May 11, 2006 10:16 AMYou do want to express yourself don't you?
grin
Just because a blog is poluted by little bits of pixelized personality by proxy doesn't have to be a bad thing. What is the writer is worried that they don't have any of their own?
Xepol on May 11, 2006 12:08 PMAnd I plan on adding a couple dozen more social bookmarking sites, because it just gets funnier and funnier to me the more sites there are.
LOL. Peter, you're part of the problem-- with pride. I can totally respect that. ;)
Jeff Atwood on May 11, 2006 12:43 PMbtw it's Raftery not Rafery. (Thank God you didn't say Raferty). Sorry, it's my girlfriends surname (seems like a relation actualy, I must check that out).
And is it just me, or do you have a similar system to Toms, just a little more generous?
[ICR] on May 11, 2006 12:44 PMHi Jeff!
I could nothing but agree with you. In fact, I've got a name for that behaviour, related to your post: "The NASCAR Syndrome". I hope this trend fades very quickly. Regards.
I wasn't aware of any of this stuff: all my blog reading comes through RSS and aggregators. I couldn't go back to optimistic site opening.
Mike Woodhouse on May 12, 2006 3:24 AMwhy do NASCAR sponsors teams want their vehicles to look like NASCAR vehicles, when the visual tapestry causes each car to look the same and hides the identity of any individual brand?
1. status quo (everyone else is doing it)
2. prestige? (more logos == more self importance)
Love the blackletter captcha.
I suggest a user-interface solution. A single button which says "subscribe", which, when clicked, opens up a small window containing all of the doodads and badges and whatnot. You give the users their choices, and you save r3al estate and ugliness.
Jonathan Feinberg on May 12, 2006 7:50 AMWell, since you brought it up, I've always thought that having your blog's comments open in a popup window is a completely retarded decision. I hated it for the first couple months I read you. I would always either maximize it or drag it to be bigger...thats a pain in the donkey.
Then I found that what I wanted was labeled "permalink" of all things o_0; When I click on it, I get to keep your webpage in a single window AND I get the comments.
You ought to relabel the links from "Permalink" and "Comments" to "Comments (normal)" and "Comments (popup window)". Then, I think you will find that nobody ever clicks on popup window and you can just delete it :)
Rick Scott on May 12, 2006 8:16 AMJeff, I love it when you put the smackdown on other blogs. But I must point out that what you are seeing is an expression of a key component of blogging.
Blogging is Pure Vanity [http://haacked.com/archive/2004/10/08/BloggingIsPureVanity.aspx]
I now realize I need to revise the article to include these so-called "chicklets"
Haacked on May 12, 2006 9:58 AMRick,
FWIW, I never knew about the comments-in-a-popup thing until 30 seconds ago. Every time I've come to Coding Horror, it's been because I've been linked and found the link via Talk Digger (http://www.talkdigger.com). That links me right to the permalink, which shows all the comments on one page. I like that user experience but can't stand comments in a popup.
tom sherman on May 12, 2006 10:00 AMJeff, you are now the official Blog Sheriff. It is your duty to flush out blogs/bloggers that don't quite meet International Jeff Blog Standards and summarily spank them. Oh, wait, you already have! Oh, well then, keep up the, uh, good work.
I certainly see the points you're making and I am a big advocate of UI. However, all this to me is a touch like nit-picking. Didn't you just recently say that content is king?
I for one like seeing all the differences in blogs. Yes, even the annoying ones sometimes. We don't want all blogs looking alike, now do we. It's differences (annoying or not) that, in addition to content, of course, set them all apart and give them personality.
That's how I see it from here. Later.
Kenneth on May 12, 2006 10:09 AMJonathan F.:
That idea is fscking fantastic. Then again, why not do it with the comments section and comment form too?
Joe Grossberg on May 12, 2006 10:22 AMA lot of it is just the way particular blog software does things (probably copied from the way every other piece of blog software). For example, achieving more than very basic archive browsing with Movable Type requires a lot of template editing and configuration, and nobody really has time to do too much of that stuff -- that's why we use premade blog software to begin with.
Also, I'd like to express my critique about your blog Jeff: the comments popping into a new window. Why? :)
Reed
reed on May 12, 2006 11:42 AMPerhaps the icons would be better served in black and white or slightly opaque.
For me, your design the long list of links under Archives is visual noise, all these blue links with no distinctive visual call out. Why would anyone want to search my month anyway?
lar on May 13, 2006 2:22 AMBTW, I took these comments to heart and restructured some things on my blog.
a href="http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/"http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet//a
Thanks for the feedback.
tom sherman on May 13, 2006 4:47 AMI think you're missing a great opportunity, Jeff. You need to just add a whole bunch of those links on your own sidebar. Instead of the images, though, use individual characters from the Webdings font. Just as informative, no?
zonker on May 15, 2006 9:17 AMWe don't want all blogs looking alike, now do we
The pursuit of simplification doesn't mean everything has to look alike.
why do NASCAR sponsors teams want their vehicles to look like NASCAR vehicles
Because they get paid a lot of money by sponsors. Which is also the reason some sites look the way they do..
Jeff Atwood on May 15, 2006 11:21 AMWho are you people and what makes you think the world cares about your blogs? Bloggers must absolutely be the most vain and pretentious people to ever innundate the net with useless search engine results. I stumbled across this, and all the serious discussion between you all about some kind of little hype buttons on somebodys little diary about nothing, and I have to wonder... Has the blogging community ever stepped back and wondered why anyone on earth would care about how your day went or your opinion on the latest news story? Go talk to your friends at the watercooler, and stop creating search engine spam. What is the library of congress was diluted with 16 million diaries. Good luck finding facts or useful data in there anymore... It's not the little icons that are noise. It's the blogs themselves.
My Name In Lights on May 16, 2006 3:48 AMJust looking through my own blog, I decided to take the XHTML valid indicator out. Not that it matters anyway since Blogger's nav bar is not XHTML compliant anyway.
I think cutting off the main/archive text to a separate page does make sense. Especially when your articles are pretty long. I haven't found a feature in blogger similar to the lj-cut so the closest thing I did was though CSS and cut it after a few lines or so. Although it only works with Firefox.
I especially liked the style of Tom's site http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/
One note on the Monthly Archive thing. I think its not a bad idea to get rid of it, considering I have Google search on my blog anyway.
I use a sidebar for some extra navigation. However, the side bar tends to get short and the page looks unbalanced which is why I have the big AdSense on the main page.
I don't bother with the syndication links or RSS feed links. All the RSS browsers or other RSS tools I've used would be able to pull the information out from the meta data anyway.
Archimedes Trajano on May 16, 2006 4:56 AMExcellent post as usual Jeff, I followed your advice after reading this. I was amazed to find that I had 28 links on my blog that I never clicked, and chances are no one else did either. So I stripped away all of them, and I think the focus is now solely on the content.
Good work.
Des
More useful would be if these icons, instead of launching the url to bookmark the item, launched the url to view the item in the service (e.g. http://del.icio.us/url/http://www.codinghorror.com,">http://www.codinghorror.com,">http://del.icio.us/url/http://www.codinghorror.com, or whatever the delicious path is) so that the user who *doesn't* use the service could be exposed to the utility (what people who bookmarked the page also bookmarked, what else was tagged with the same tags, user comments, etc.), the relative strengths of the different services (I certainly don't know why someone would use something other than delicious), etc. Along the same lines as trackback (e.g. this post was bookmarked in these social services and here is the link to the information generated...).
ahb on July 5, 2006 8:59 AMI've frequently thought about links to the next article on YOUR page. I like that they are easy to find at the top and after the article, but what about after I've read all the comments? I always have to scroll up.
Chris on July 24, 2008 1:13 PMI think cutting off the main/archive text to a separate page does make sense. Especially when your articles are pretty long. I haven't found a feature in blogger similar to the lj-cut so the closest thing I did was though CSS and cut it after a few lines or so. Although it only works with Firefox.
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Er... the text is invisible when the google ad is in view. As soon as I scroll away from it it appears again., I can also select the text to make it appear but it dissapears as soon as I scroll.
BmB on February 17, 2009 8:46 AMThanks for the great comparison of blog appearance and Nascar vehicles. The many stickers and advertisements on the vehicles can be really distracting, but they have the benefit of traveling at such high speeds during a race, the individual ads blur into a tolerable color. With a blog though, no such high speeds are possible. When writing about topics like shopping, masonry or blogging dos and don'ts, the page will be viewed at reading pace only.
GramJ on March 4, 2011 8:24 AMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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