Comments on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream? - AddedBytes.com

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Charlene ( http://www.webwisewardens.com )

I am about to start at the beginning of your blog, having just discovered it through a link to a cheat sheet on Javascript.

What is most useful for me is a way to keep track of what posts I have read. And I don't mean in my browser history list which disappears when I delete the history or after 10 days. I wouldn't mind having to register (for free of course) so that this information could be stored somewhere.

Since I am interested in all your posts at this point, just being able to start at the beginning and read my way through (over several days) is what I need right now.

If you have posts that are worth going back to (and so far it looks like you do), the category list is one way. But when you start to build up a large amount of posts, important information gets harder to find even with categories. You may need subcategories.

Thank you for your website.

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Alberto ( )

As a user I'm fond of the good old category tree, related articles and search.

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by bill ( http://techrageo.us )

Interesting.

I'm not a regular reader but have been here before.

Here's how I got to this article: while looking at my del.icio.us page I have some time to stumble around the web, so I click over to del.icio.us for the hotlist and tags to watch. Somewhere there your cheat-sheets category page showed up and I was thinking, "Hmmm, I Love Jack Daniels... been there before and liked it but don't remember exactly the topic." So I ctrl-clicked it for later viewing. Once I got around to it (btw, nice sheets, thanks), I still vaguely remember liking your content, so I clicked the header to see what was new, paying only a passing glance at the sidebar (for now). At the root level I scroll down kind of slowly but not reading anything in depth (there's something intangible that was fouling my reading gears - the whitespace maybe?). Anyway, I see this article and start reading. Good stuff here.

So since I kind of like the article I'm tempted to dig around a bit. I'll head to the sidebar, back to the homepage, and only after that is exhausted will I maybe try to tackle your archive table. I see you have categories and months. That tells me very little and I don't have time to poke around at one site hoping to find something of value. (No offense, just hoping to help.)

What would compel me, a returning but still occasional reader, to read more, or read more often? Well, a list of popular content would give me a fair snapshot of your content, a list of your content picks would help me know what *you* like, a list of recent content would tell me what's occupying your interest lately, etc. It's all important to develop a feel for whether and how frequently I visit in the future.

The big problem is you're competing with a bizillion other yayhoos who want readers; readers with microscopic attention spans. Show me the good stuff, the stuff you like, the recent stuff, ... don't expect me to dig around until you make the case that this is an interesting place to hang out. You got my attention early with the domain name, now you've got to keep my attention.

Also, once someone downloads all your cheat-sheets, they're outta here unless you highlight your writing (which is great btw). Maybe sometime later they come back and get a new sheet, but more likely they forget. I've got a thousand-twenty bushels of links (including yours) at del.icio.us and the only reason I got back here was seeing someone else's link to you. You need to make it to my daily list (which is too big for me to get through daily but you'd be one or two clicks away from my browser start page).

Sorry for the long wandering comment. Just wanted you to know how you could hook me (or anyone for that matter) into coming back.

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Topher Fangio ( http://fangiotophia.com:3000/ )

Hi Dave,

After reading some of these posts I have an idea that might work. First off, think of many of the e-commerce sites and attempt to see how they correlate to a blog. They display new products that have been released (frontpage of most blogs), have categories of all of the products available (perhaps tags on posts) and they usually have one other aspect...a clearance section.

The online store is wanting to get rid of some old merchandise so that they have room for the new. In the case of a blog, we might be able to implement a system that shows articles relevant to today. If you are reading the news and realize that one of your posts from four years ago is relevant, you should be able to tag it and have it displayed as a link on the front page. Perhaps it could even be more automated by crawling many news sites and then searching your site (google?) for older articles that might be helpful to readers.

This ensures that the most relevant posts have a chance at making it back out of the archive and it keeps non-relevant posts from ever being seen. This may be good and may be bad. I will leave it up to you to decide.

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Ole ( )

Tags are helpfull after you've ended up on a blog about some topic you're researching.

Say you've searched for something with Javascript and find something usefull on a blog where the are other posts in the same topic or Javascript in general. I'll wast 2 mins to check out atleast the headlines of the posts in the categories that I find interesting on a page.

A voting system is great, hopefully more people will vote then those who comment on a post ;-). Random strangers like myself that come here once a month or so or regular users.

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Dave Child ( http://www.addedbytes.com )

Ferdy: This looks like the post you were talking about: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/blog-or-get-off-pot.html

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Ferdy ( http://www.ferdychristant.com )

I agree, tag clouds say nothing about content popularity, only about sizing. That's why I had this idea of using color codes along with size to indicate both the size and popularity of tags. Never worked it out in practice though.

Yes, the digg.com style blog homepage would require a lot of readers, perhaps too much for an individual's blog. Although I can't find the particular entry where it was discussed, it at least was on this blog:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Adrian ( http://www.camaban.co.uk )

Perhaps, if you had the mechanisms in place, you could work out rough importance based on the number of page views, or maybe the backlinks to an article in Yahoo! for instance.

Almost like you're own internal Google PR, heh.

More popular, and therefore hopefully better content, you'd expect to get more page views and more links.

Problematic when it comes to quantifying RSS reads etc.... Would be other issues too, but could be another way of working out usefullnes.

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Dave Child ( http://www.addedbytes.com )

Hi Ferdy,

"A new user can quickly see what most of the content in the site is about."

True. I think that has a certain advantage. However, someone could write a thousand articles on CSS, but it might be that their best piece is on JavaScript. A tag cloud has no understanding of quality - just frequency.

The other advantage of a tag cloud, as I see it, is that if a site is known for its writings on one subject, but the author has written a lot on another subject, that becomes clear quickly.

"The guy's idea was to have his blog homepage set to a digg.com style overview of his most popular content, and users can vote for it."

That's a really interesting idea! I suppose it requires a certain level of readership before it could work. I'd be interested in seeing the site in question, if you remember it.

Comment on Usable Archives - A Pipe Dream?

Comment by Ferdy Christant ( http://www.ferdychristant.com )

Great discussion. I have two things to add. I don't think tag clouds are completely useless. They are fairly useless for navigation, in that aspects they are identical to categories which we have seen since the beginning of the web. It is the font sizing in the cloud that makes it useful to me. A new user can quickly see what most of the content in the site is about. Slightly useless, but not completely :)

The second thing I would like to add is an idea I read somewhere on a blog. The guy's idea was to have his blog homepage set to a digg.com style overview of his most popular content, and users can vote for it. Only the most popular entries stay on the homepage. Users that would like to keep up with the blog chronologically can still do that by RSS or an additional "view" on the blog. I find this idea to be daring, but highly innovative. I'm too afraid to try it myself, but what do you think?