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.
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