[thelist] Site check request + blatant weblog promotion

[Simon Willison]

At 11:21 18/06/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>1. "Google It"
>This is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure the implementation is usable;
>it's not clear what I'm searching for until I hover, and by then I could
>have gone to Google and searched myself. If it were me (which it isn't,
>obviously), I'd change the link to say "Google Search for '$word'" so users
>who don't know the hover trick have some idea where they're going.

Sounds sensible to me. This should also increase accessibility - having a
link with the same text that points to different URLs is a big "no" as far
as accessibility for screen readers etc is concerned.

>The same thing (albeit to a lesser extent) goes for your non-intuitive
>practice of using the time the entry was posted as a link to the entry. It
>makes sense afterwards -- but if I wanted to link to one of your entries, I
>might not be wondering "Gee, maybe if I hover over the time the entry was
>posted, it'll tell me how to link to the entry itself." (-: I'd be scanning
>for something that said "Link."

Actually until yesterday I was using the word "Permalink" for these links -
I changed to using the time for the accessibility reasons mentioned above
(and because the footer was getting pretty crowded). The popular blogging
software Moveable Type defaults to using the time as a permalink so I
thought I would get away with it. I'll think about changing this when I
rejiggle the site design.

>2. Location of time/category/Google It
>I think it'd be more useful to put (at least) the category on the top of
>each entry rather than the bottom, because it helps users with little time
>on their hands to easily skip entries in categories that are of no interest
>to them. Assuming I'm reading in a linear fashion (or haven't scrolled to
>the bottom of a post), I don't get to know what the category is until I've
>already read the post -- at which point I hopefully know what it's about
>already.

Great point. Again worth thinking about when I rejiggle the design.

>3. Archives and Categories
>... are great if your users are seasoned webheads (apparently the target
>audience for your blog), but they would give me a scare if I were a Web
>newbie. Not only do they look nothing like the rest of your blog, they look
>downright scary -- Apache what? index of funky looking path name with
>slashes going the wrong way?

That's just me being lazy - I haven't got around to implementing a "pretty"
version of those pages yet so I fell back on default Apache behavior. I'll
fix that shortly.

Thanks for the excellent feedback :)

Simon