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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 I’ve been rewriting HUGE monolithic 200+ page user guides that are just littered with screenshots (outdated, of course) and a structure that follows the UI (“menu1 does this, menu 2 does that”) not the UX (“How to add a category”).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
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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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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
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
colak wrote #309097:
…If you are looking for more involved content, there are currently no alternatives to the scholar and books subdomains of google.
I’ve heard this argument before, and I’m not saying there’s not an indexing difference between Gaggle and DDG — which, let’s admit, is the result of shoving Gaggle Search down our throats for years thus gaining the monopolistic advantage, like Macrohard did with IE, Word, etc, until the world is stupidly addicted to the lock-in — but I have a hard time buying it.
I’ve been using DDG for about 2 years now, solely, laptop and phone, and I do a lot of research of various kind (mostly historical these days; no, not Wikipedia, but the stuff Wikipedia relies on) and I’ve never had problems finding stuff. It might be taking me a little longer to get there, I don’t know, but I’m getting there.
Maybe it’s a personal method/behavior thing… I don’t just tap keywords every single time I look for something. Yes, periodically you have to start digging from the search box, but when I find a good source that is itself a legacy jump-off point — university databases, city archives, underground government caverns, etc — I bookmark those search UIs and go straight to them after that. Once you have the legacy links to springboard from, there’s no need for pecking into a Gaggle box like a zombie bird. (Reminds me of people, like in my own family, addicted to GPS who will use it to drive across town. We’re letting our brains go to shit; being lead around by an electronic leash. But I digress.) And if you refine your search digging queries, or mix them up a bit — a laborious extra minute or two, but hey, it’s research, right? — you can still find things from DDG.
Just saying.
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
colak wrote #309088:
What about the .org and .com domains?
Well, the .com and .io sites I mean (the sites I manage). The .org site I have never touched the codebase on and am never likely to. I’ll eventually close that site down anyway, when we have a replacement.
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
colak wrote #309097:
If you are looking for more involved content, there are currently no alternatives to the scholar and books subdomains of google.
How about startpage? I use that. The results are “powered by Google” but it doesn’t track anything you search for. The results do differ, but I’ve had no issue finding stuff. Not into scholarly works though, so maybe such markets are left out in the cold.
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
Destry wrote #309099:
We’re letting our brains go to shit; being lead around by an electronic leash.
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
Destry wrote #309099:
I’ve heard this argument before, and I’m not saying there’s not an indexing difference between Gaggle and DDG — which, let’s admit, is the result of shoving Gaggle Search down our throats for years thus gaining the monopolistic advantage, like Macrohard did with IE, Word, etc, until the world is stupidly addicted to the lock-in — but I have a hard time buying it.
Agreed. DDG works well (well enough?) for me. It might be down to personal methodology, the used / preferred keywords… One issue I have though is that DDG is a wee bit stubborn and emphasizes English results too much, even if my queries are in French / Spanish / Japanese.
We’re letting our brains go to shit; being lead around by an electronic leash.
Oh yes, it is becoming disastrous.
Where is that emoji for a solar powered submarine when you need it ?
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Re: "Keep your blogs light"
Bloke wrote #309109:
How about startpage? I use that. The results are “powered by Google” but it doesn’t track anything you search for. The results do differ, but I’ve had no issue finding stuff. Not into scholarly works though, so maybe such markets are left out in the cold.
I have startpage as my default search engine but scholar.google.com and books.google.com can not be searched in any other way that I could find. I understand Destry’s rave above but I still believe that the methodology limits the wealth of results we can find in the more specific g search engines. Using them for me, is not a matter of convenience, it is a matter of volume as I discover though them, scholarly texts and books on the subjects I am researching, that it would probably take me days to find in bookmarked academic sites most of which do not even offer pdf content search.
Yiannis
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