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Two Blog User Interface Issues

Published
by
Josh Kim
on May 8, 2008
in User Interface & Design
. 0 Comments

Two. Two big issues that I see rarely, but often enough to write a post about it.

Previous/Next vs Older/Newer

NEVER EVER use “Previous”/”Next” when paginating. EVER.

The vast majority of the use case of the Internet: Googling information. What happens when you pop into a blog with hive page and is faced with two options: “Previous” and “Next”. Does “Next” correspond to chronologically later or earlier posts?

A better pair of words that should be used here are “Older” and “Newer”. Since blogs are almost always, by default, ordered chronologically, it makes a whole lot of sense to use this pair of words.

The place where I feel like there is actually a little leeway is the positioning of “Older” and “Next”. I’m on the side (pun? hardly) that puts “Older” on the left, as if the person reading is flipping through the book from page one to the last written page. In this case, the blog becomes a sort of a never-ending story.

But regardless, as long as it saves me the trouble of guessing, hitting the wrong one, swearing inside, hitting back, and then getting to the right page, I’ll be a happier person inside.

Not having pagination at all (Yes, Blogger, I’m looking at you)

What is wrong with you?

I really do need to test this out, but I seriously hope that Blogger doesn’t default to not having any sort of Previous/Next or Older/Newer links.

Let’s go through an example: http://buzz.blogger.com/

Go all the way to the bottom. Where are the pagination links? Who knows. Scroll back up. WOW The months are in backwards order than I expected (I mean, the posts that are just left of it go chronologically newer to older… why should the archives link follow that logic, too?).

The real fun starts when you want to go to the post made just before the oldest story on the main page. You have to remember what month when the story was posted (Feb 2008, while I write this), click on that month’s archive (grumble again how the month order is backwards), scroll down until you see that oldest post on the main page, then go down one more to start continuing the stream of blog posts.

Horrible.

This isn’t just for Blogger, though. I’m sure there are other blogs or other web applications that get this wrong. Please fix it.

Josh Kim’s Twitter Updates: 2008-05-07

Published
by
Josh Kim
on May 7, 2008
in Twitter Updates
. 0 Comments
  • I just realized again how much I freaking twitter, looking at my daily Twitter update. #
  • I kinda want to resurrect my blog project. But of course, this is the nerdy extreme OCD engineer in me. Need more of the relaxed social guy. #
  • K2 RC6 and WP2.5.1 Updated. #
  • Brian Chung. The man itself. http://snipurl.com/27hgt #
  • ASUS 900s. Looks pretty nice. http://tinyurl.com/67edfp #
  • Florence Foster Jenkins. Wow. http://listverse.s3.amazonaws.com/music/jenkins.mp3 #
  • Fon paid me 8 bucks. I am so happy. #
  • http://tinyurl.com/3hb2lq WELL DONE. #
  • Rock Band has been ordered from Amazon. For the Wii. I’ll write on the logic behind this later. #
  • At my lunch: Why the heck is there bacon in my chalupa? Or… is it not bacon? #
  • Bacon Club Chalupa. Ah HA! http://www.tacobell.com/bigbox/ #
  • From this point on, wherever I would have typed "intarwebz", I will use the shorthand "webz". Saves me 5 keystrokes each time. #
  • Okay, I might have to give it another chance and read every single one of these. TO THE MAX. http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000013.html #
  • Having one heck of a time focusing at work. Taking a walk. #
  • This type of rain reminds of something sappy and saccharine. #
  • Oh, what the heck. A dove just flew by as the rain stopped. What is this, a John Woo movie? #
  • I can see it now: two protagonists fight just outside the NCSA building, and the battle ends, the rain lets up and a white dove flies by. #
  • @jpong HAHAHAH. Did you run out the 140? Hilarious. #
  • GTA IV did $500 million. Amazing. But what’s the breakdown across consoles? #

Josh Kim’s Twitter Updates: 2008-05-06

Published
by
Josh Kim
on May 6, 2008
in Twitter Updates
. 0 Comments
  • @jpong From the Internetz, here it is: Washing pasta with cold water will wash away the starch, and so it’ll prevent sauce from sticking. GG #
  • @alexargo Don’t forget the Coronas. Which reminds me… keke. #
  • @jpong I agree. However, this was *ghetto* spaghetti. If you were expecting a 9/10, *you* FAIL. *FIN*. #
  • Jerry Yang, make up your mind. http://tinyurl.com/6jujeo #
  • College Humor is doing an all-nighter. Check it out. It’s hilarious. http://www.collegehumor.com/tag:chtv #
  • Now I can tell people I’ve had an Ultrasound. Weeee. #
  • Bi-Colbert Dance Off http://tinyurl.com/5m6maf #
  • Now you can download Starcraft digitally. http://tinyurl.com/6m3dw4,c:7 #
  • Who wants a free month of GameFly? I think I have 5 to give out. #
  • Scratch that, I might have less… because it turns out, all I have to do is give people the URL. #
  • @BobSevenEleven Probably. But I never had a problem with cancelling. I like it a lot, and they even gave me a discount on another month. #
  • @BobSevenEleven And yeah, I’m not getting anything out of this. Just a friendly gesture. #
  • Trying out iDemocracy. #
  • And now, I have a jailbroken phone. First time since 1.1.2, I believe. #
  • @alexargo It’s the first thing I installed, hehe. #
  • Twinkle. I’m impressed. But what’s the deal with these squares? No i18n? What a shame. http://snipurl.com/27f9x #
  • Why the heck do safari updates require restarts these days? http://snipurl.com/27g9t #
  • I am very afraid of the gas prices right now. I don’t want to look. #
  • @jpong It’s gonna be sunny today. Sad. More coffee. #

Josh Kim’s Twitter Updates: 2008-05-05

Published
by
Josh Kim
on May 5, 2008
in Twitter Updates
. 0 Comments
  • Another weekend gone by. Wow. Time’s flying. #
  • YHOO is down 20% pre-market. Finally, I was wondering when this would happen. #
  • Reasons why I will not use Twhirl: No shortcut keys (that I can figure out), Much more complicated UI than Twitterific (AIR vs Desktop, si). #
  • I love hitting the 140 char max on Twitter. It’s like playing a word game, except I like it. Also, the limit makes it fit in 2 lines on fb. #
  • @alexargo That kinda makes sense. Does AIR use some different port numbers? #
  • Dave Brubeck is the man. Jazz piano is too delicious. #
  • @BobSevenEleven What are you doing? Oh holy crap, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! #
  • @BobSevenEleven Argo *made* you set this up? Yeah, I saw you followed me the other day, and I was surprised. #
  • @jpong Before, one of the nerdiest things to do were to AIM while talking to a person. Now it’s Twittering while talking on AIM. Oy. #
  • @alexargo Maybe I’ll make a quesadiluh for lunch. #
  • Lunch hour flies by wayyy to fast. #
  • XMPP is the future. There, I finally wrote it down somewhere. Time to go start doing something with it. #
  • New Purchase: Wacom Tablet. What is wrong with me… #
  • One option with Rock Band: Just wait until June 22nd. Get game and drums. Be kinda happy #
  • Another option with Rock Band: Buy the 360. Get Rock Band. Get GTA IV. There goes the stimulus package money. #
  • @fritzy I’ve had a couple of project ideas before based on XMPP, but never really finished. It might be Rails. It might not. #
  • @fritzy And hello, fritzy! Looks like you’re doing some PHP/XMPP…? Cool. #
  • Dear US Treasury. Thanks for the $600. Now go check your accounts, twitterati. #
  • Eh, maybe it’s just me. #
  • http://tinyurl.com/6xeec2 ME. #
  • @al3x Hilarious. So very very deliciously hilarious. Hmm…. salmon… #

Let Me Try This Again, Part 1: Twitter

Published
by
Josh Kim
on May 5, 2008
in Site News and Web Applications
. 1 Comment

I believe this is the third post (that actually made online… I’m not even counting the countless edits and deletes) that is supposed to jump start the blogging machine raging within me.

Maybe if I make this post into “Part 1″ of many, I’ll be compelled to come back and explore new topics. Oh, how much I love to trick myself into doing things.

And so, after closing AIM and Twitter: Let me try this again.

“What are you doing?”

Yes. If you’ve been watching anything on this blog for the past three months, I’ve had 80… EIGHTY… daily twitter summary posts. I think around eighty days ago was when I stopped blogging frequently.

Being such a new medium (and not just to me), I feel as though what counts as “normal” is being established. Some are seeing my updates and are completely horrified. Some are somehow led to follow me and keep up insanely quick paced and lengthy conversations (Yes, I’m looking at you, Jong-Sun… if any of you are following me on Twitter, this man probably has started up Twitter wars with me too often).

Whatever the case may be, I’ve made Twitter my own. I’ve followed and have been followed, and vice versa. It’s a different beast than anything that followed before in the Interwebs.

And it’s a refreshing feeling.

What was I doing before?

I don’t remember very well when I started my Twitter account. It must have been awhile ago… but back then, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it.

Of course, as with all social networks, Twitter became useful with people. Earlier on, I didn’t get it. As time passed, finding interesting people to follow (@davemc500hats, @gruber, @siooma even) and even making new people sign up to Twitter has been all too eye-opening.

But first, a little bit about StatusFix.

StatusFix’s Fix Found in Twitterific/TwitterSync

My desire with the side project of StatusFix was simple: It was what I needed. I wanted a way to track my past “away”/status messages, as well as an interface to see what other people’s were.

Even since I used the “away” message box as a secondary channel for communication, I wanted a way to have a historical backlog of it; I wanted to be able to search it (due to my insanely geeky nature of trying to have a new “away” message up every time I was “away”); I wanted it to be publicly available outside of AIM (linkable).

SIDENOTE: Why do I keep using passive? Crap.

I keep putting away in quotation marks because the “away” message is a perfect example of how people took a feature and made it their own. A vast majority of the people to this day aren’t actually away when their “away” message is up. More or less, it has become their status message: the song their listening to, the thing that they’re reading, the affect of the current weather to his or her mood. Soon, the networks realized this (MSN, I believe, was the first to implement this) and made it possible to still be online, but have a status message as well.

Due to Twitter’s extremely open API architecture (including their Jabber push mechanism), as long as they keep being stable, Twitter could be the back bone of such a system.

And so, I decided to use this backbone. Many Twitter clients (I especially prefer Twitterific) give me the ability to tie my status message with Twitter and AIM. Also, by using TwitterSync, I’m able to sync my status with Facebook.

AIM, Facebook, Twitter. One “return” to rule them all. (I really tried to using the word “return” with the Return of the King, but I stopped caring.)

The Existing Problems

As I said before, stability is a problem with Twitter. Hopefully, that’ll be dealt with soon enough, regardless if they go with some other language/framework.

Also, since this system is dependent on so many different pieces, it’s much more likely to fail than, say, having an actual fully fledged app to handle all statuses.

This also means that people are getting the same content three times. If a friend of mine is also on AIM, Facebook, and Twitter, they’ll see the same update in three different streams.

But then again, maybe these problems will be fixed by StatusFix, or some other solution. FriendFeed? Maybe.

More likely, I’m making a big deal out of nothing. My needs tend to be quite specific at times.

WEEE!!!

Which reminds me, the next post will do something with the Wii. And Rock Band. Or something.

Or I’ll work on the actual blog itself.