Designing blogs for readers

Matt comes very close to one of my beliefs about writing... Creative writing is a way to give yourself an opportunity to think through an topic or story and give the rest of us an insight into how your mind works. That's the kind of writing I love -- the kind where I can see the gears moving to a certain degree and I know the author is honestly putting an effort into analyzing a subject or putting something difficult into words.

As an example, I think this is why the recent "Hyperbole and a Half" (http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2013/05/depression-par...) about Allie's experiences with depression is so valuable and compelling.

And it's why I find listicles and articles that purport to be delivering glorious nuggets of truth from the top of Mount Bullshit to be boring, frustrating, and obnoxious. (If you look at my comment history, you'll probably find a fair amount of bitching about articles that are nothing but (often wrong or over-simplified) conclusions with no evident thought process behind them.)

I think it's actually something that's hard to fake. Like Matt says, your personality and opinions are integral. And it almost forces you to start writing about something you're not so sure about, which can seem uncomfortable. Because you might come to wrong conclusions. But if you write to edify yourself and to give yourself the chance to meditate and process the world around you, then suddenly sheer audience count will matter much less and (if you're a good thinker) you might find yourself writing much more compelling pieces, anyway, since, like I said, I think people appreciate being able to see the mental processes of another person at work.

So. I've diverged a bit from Matt's initial point, but his words made me think of this so I thought I'd share...

(Before someone else says it: No, I'm not talking about technical or instructional writing. That's different.)

However, many blogs don't attract comments in their hundreds. For me, disabling comments would feel like saying to blog readers that I'm not interested in what they think about my blog post (and I am). You might write for yourself as you compose posts, but when you publish your post you want others to read it. Are there blog authors who can honestly say they aren't interested in the views of their readers about what they've written?

I would rather a conversation take place on my blog than telling users to take the discussion elsewhere. (You can't really discuss things in a 140 character tweet).

Related to this discussion is another viewpoint about getting rid of social media buttons http://ia.net/blog/sweep-the-sleaze/

People generally don't put as much work into their comments as you did into your blog post, so the comment section is a tangible dive in written quality. And they tend to be quite "fire and forget", because although somebody might disagree with something in the five seconds after reading a post, they are unlikely to remember that disagreement two days later and return to see if anyone responded.

Personally, if somebody felt strongly enough about something I wrote to want to say something to me something about it, I'd prefer an email anyway.

1. Comments are still necessary. Tweeting a link and a short comment doesn't cut it; not everyone has a blog (or wants to make a public post to a different audience about another blogger's post) just to respond - to assume people will blog about you is sheer arrogance. Maybe Matt doesn't care what others think, or want a discussion and discourse, but I certainly do.

2. Opening links in new windows or tabs is OK if your blog has a very non-technical audience. Most people don't know the keyboard shortcuts for opening in a new tab, and even though they can right click... don't. It's always fun to see people's enthusiasm when I show them the shortcuts, and to watch them start opening links in multiple tabs!

I don't really agree with this one. From my perspective as a reader, I prefer when links have target="_blank" set, because it means if I forget to (or couldn't be arsed to) ctrl+click or right-click -> open link in new tab, I still don't lose my place on the current page, and can go poke around at the linked content at my leisure.

Maybe I'm weird (OK, obviously I'm weird in some regards) but I prefer to open links as I go, but read the main text-stream first, then go back and read linked articles, posts, citations, etc. If they are conveniently opened in a pile of tabs, it makes my life easier.

Curious how the rest of the HN readership feels about this...

http://jmoiron.net

I decided even to dispatch with the header bar, putting navigation at the bottom of the main page; presumably, people will only care to see more of my writing if they've read the article. Not as good for people revisiting the page, but they can likely remember http://jmoiron.net/blog or bookmark it in order to get to the search.

My fonts are slightly smaller and slightly less contrast, and after looking at Gemmell's blog I wonder if I should change that decision. I wanted to have emphasized elements of the text easily distinguishable from the body while not distracting.

Also, I agree with Gemmell's "The basic tenets of hypertext should be left alone". One of these basic tenets, to me, are the semantic meanings of Blue, Purple, and Red text for normal, :visited, and :active hyperlinks. If you want to chose a link color, do not invert or violate these classical meanings.

What are good options for presenting significantly longer works? For example, a 30-page paper, or a 100-page book?

Is it best for readability / usability to break things out into short blog posts? Or ditch the blog format altogether and just upload some HTML files that use a totally different style? Or something else?

But I kinda feel that this goes a tad over on the minimalistic side, which isn't too bad, but I wouldn't like if applied in dogmatic way to all sites.

I don't know if the “most popular posts” lists are the most optimal for content discovery, but having none seems a bit harsh. No, I'm probably not looking for blog posts on specific date, but I often look couple previous or next posts and the latest if they happen to relate to same subject, or if there is more interesting content to be had.

Comments, I'm torn over them. I feel like it's an lost battle to have discussions coherently in one place, but still many times I've found comments on top ranking posts about problems I've had to be invaluable, with corrections, alternative suggestions and updates to later versions of software. Also doesn't mesh well with statically generated sites unless something like disqus is used, which I generally don't like that much..

Social media buttons I value just about as much as I value any random ads on pages. Even if I share page I do it by copying the address anyway — but I guess it's a bit different on more mainstream oriented sites where the median user might find address bars exotic and intimidating.

Also I would be interest on thoughts on how images relate to this. Should they also be constrained within the text column bounds, should they be lightboxed or link directly to the original picture? I find myself a little conflicted on good use. This author seems to like linking to non-working flickr pages.

Hmm, I sound perhaps a little negative, but my overall impression was still on the positive side.

edit: There is a similar problem on several of the namedropped sites too, http://www.marco.org/ http://shawnblanc.net/ and http://www.loopinsight.com/ all have a weird mixture of title formatting of the posts. Sometimes it is big, sometimes small, I have trouble seeing where are post starts or ends and what are just smaller headings within one.

The one thing I disagree with is comments. Comments are hard to get right, but they're not replaceable by social media alone.

In addition it has an Android app which is done very well. About 80% of the posts that I see here on HN, I simply safe for later and read at home in the garden with this app.

Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense of quotes, images, supporting items - that are called left, right, or full width.

Using your site as an example and lets pretend its 12 columns with 3 empty, 6 for the blog, 3 empty. That space could be well served with links, resources, images, quotes that serve to enhance the writing. These resources could stretch into the 6 for the blog or remain isolated in their sidebars.

Now I'm happy with just single columns...much less work to maintain, much more readable for users, and more time to think about the actual words rather than CSS.

Moving to Markdown helped expedite my preference for simplicity, too.

As our viewing surfaces only get more diverse, I hope single columns are a long lasting trend