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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
philwareham wrote #308899:
EDIT: a couple of clicks on those ads from our loyal user base would help expedite matters ;)
Done. I needed another CMS and some ladies swimwear after all :-)
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
@jakob it was another page of his blog, which has got images on it. I just thought it was amusing to talk of absolute minimalism on one blog page and then have another blog page with hugely unoptimised images within it. I’m snarky.
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
philwareham wrote #308904:
I’m snarky.
See, this is what a long-term Monster Munch habit does to you.
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
jakob wrote #308902:
Regarding visual or textual communication, I really think it depends on how and what you communicate.
This.
My site’s not beautiful. It’s 99.6% responsive, but my font choices suck, don’t obey the golden ratio and I don’t use visuals enough. My typographical elements are also non-existent. In my favour, the site doesn’t use any analytics. JavaScript is used to a point, but I try to minimise it. I’m not a designer, and it shows.
As I alluded in another post, my day job is now creating and streamlining tech docs. I’ve been rewriting HUGE monolithic 200+ page user guides that are just littered with screenshots (outdated, of course) and a structure that follows the UI (“menu1 does this, menu 2 does that”) not the UX (“How to add a category”).
When I restructured (a.k.a. started again) and cut out 90% of all visuals, describing it instead and using step-by-steps so the doc is more accessible and less lazy (“see Figure 435” isn’t very helpful if you can’t see and there’s no surrounding descriptive text) I got in hot water. “Where are the screenshots?” my boss asked. “People like screenshots, it makes them feel comfortable!” Aside from the fact they’re a pain to keep up-to-date, my argument is always they should be used sparingly and only when necessary, primarily for orientation.
My point? Blogs should follow the same approach. Use visuals and typography to augment the text, not replace it.
Last edited by Bloke (2018-01-26 11:19:27)
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
Bloke wrote #308909:
My point? Blogs should follow the same approach. Use visuals and typography to augment the text, not replace it.
This was my point too, but I think it got lost in the defense of graphic design. ;)
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
I can kind of agree with him as blogs should be about reading and not about illustrations. On the other hand, the web is not just blogs – as delightful as some of them might be.
Sometimes it is about artworks, sometimes it is about selling products, sometimes it is about publishing more involved texts. We recently published a text which is over 24,000 words. I would like to see how he can have that in under 10k… or sell a bike, a gadget or any 3d object without supplying at least two views of it in high enough definition to persuade the potential buyers.
Very much of the computer software recently is bloatware, and this of course reflects in the web from the way the sites are designed (guilty) to the way the content management systems are put together. We all need to learn how to live with less. As cliche as it has become, I still agree with the one principle of modern design that it is not how much you include, but how much you leave out. It is about how economically, you can express your concept or tell your story.
In the end it is not about minimalism (Mies van der Rohe’s, Less is more) or post-modernism (Tom Wolfe’s Less is a bore), but about clarity. I think that this is what we all strive for.
Yiannis
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
Just a note that I’ve removed Google AdSense from Textpattern’s official sites, I’d scraped enough revenues to keep the .io domain name fees paid for a couple of years and AdSense was stopping the site having a Pagespeed score that I was happy with – and was impossible to setup with a Content Security Policy (slow clap, Google), so its gone for good. Apart from a couple of ad referrals if you click on them, the sites are totally free from any third party tracking of user behaviour now.
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#20 2018-02-05 17:50:30
- uli
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
Thanks, Phil, for your work on this. And once again for even disabling G’s tracking via G-fonts!
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
philwareham wrote #309085:
Just a note that I’ve removed Google AdSense from Textpattern’s official sites, I’d scraped enough revenues to keep the .io domain name fees paid for a couple of years and AdSense was stopping the site having a Pagespeed score that I was happy with – and was impossible to setup with a Content Security Policy (slow clap, Google), so its gone for good. Apart from a couple of ad referrals if you click on them, the sites are totally free from any third party tracking of user behaviour now.
What about the .org and .com domains?
Yiannis
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NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
philwareham wrote #309085:
Apart from a couple of ad referrals if you click on them, the sites are totally free from any third party tracking of user behaviour now.
I watched this interview with the founder of DuckDuckGo this weekend. I think he came across as slightly/somewhat/super paranoid but if privacy is your area of concern, it is worth listening to.
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
michaelkpate wrote #309090:
I watched this interview with the founder of DuckDuckGo this weekend. I think he came across as slightly/somewhat/super paranoid but if privacy is your area of concern, it is worth listening to.
I wish I could use it more. If you are looking for more involved content, there are currently no alternatives to the scholar and books subdomains of google.
Yiannis
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NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
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