Second Initial

Weekend Rant

Here goes. There are two scenarios that are bugging me tonight. The first is going to seem like I’m directly attacking some of my best friends, and I apologize for that because it’s not my intent to do so. This isn’t directed at any one person—rather, it’s a general observation of a phenomenon that seems it’ll never die.

I’m talking about the omnipotent link dump.

That’s right. Link dump. You know, the second you sign on your instant messenger and one of your contacts immediately starts tossing every URL they’d saved “just for you” into the message window.

You know what? I’m actually guilty of it. I’ll rant against myself as quickly as anyone else. But tonight, I just wasn’t in the mood, and sure enough, three different contacts began sharing the fruits of their surfing as soon as I came online.

I’m in extreme danger of offending my friends, and I hope that isn’t the case because there are some times that I actually do enjoy what you have to share. But I do propose that a small bit of consideration—such that I, too, should observe. First, maybe allow time for whoever just signed in to casually make note of all his contacts who just observed him signing in. And second, attempt to ascertain whether the person is in the mood for a link dump.

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My second rant is about something none of my friends and contacts (to my knowledge) are guilty of. I’m now talking about bloggers who don’t see a problem with having an archive page that contains every single bloody entry on a single page. This especially goes for those blogs that have a photo as part of every entry.

You know the scenario: you’re doing some sort of Google image search and you find something that interests you. So, you click over to look at it and your browser is quickly stuck in its tracks while your CPU devotes a bazillion cycles toward processing all those photos on that long page.

Sure, the individual photos aren’t large, but if you average a couple of posts a week and do that for several years, you’ve now got an archive page with hundreds—potentially thousands—of photos on it.

And it doesn’t matter how beefy your computer is, your browser is going to sludge along slower than a snail while it works on rendering all these images.

Everyone gets the concept of breaking up archived content. No page needs to have more than a month’s worth of your blogging antics. No one should have to wade through a few years worth of emo just to get to August 2001. Blogging engines nearly always have a simple means to define monthly archives instead of listing everything on one page.

Oh, and I’m not talking about a single page listing all your blog headlines. I have that on my blog, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m talking about a single page containing the headline, full body entry, and embedded photos of every single entry for however many years you’ve been blogging.

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Okay, I’m done now. And yes, I am well aware that I didn’t activate comments for this entry. Even though my blog comments automatically close after a while, I just don’t feel like entertaining any discussion on this topic for even a couple days—just like I wasn’t in the mood for link dumps tonight. It’s simply my opinion posted to my own blog. If that’s a problem for, well then bully for you.

» Posted by ALBj at 09:42 PM (ET)
Category: Rant

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