Thoughts on blog navigation and pagination in response to David Ely: ardisson.org
@smokey I'm convinced. I'd like to move away from the page numbers soon and design a years/months archive page.
@manton Not sure what you mean by page numbers, I don't see them on my micro.blog, but I do see Older and Newer posts, is that what you mean? Also, I observe that with micro.blog that once you drill down to a post, there is no navigation between posts, you always have to return to the top level, index page. This appears to be a "feature" of Jekyll. I would love to have auto generated archive pages.
@frankm Yes, I meant the Older/Newer links which essentially split up the blog into pages of 20 posts each (and create page number URLs). Good point about navigating between posts.
@frankm I don’t personally mind the permalink pages being sparse. I don’t know how many people ever click the “next/prev post” links vs just going to the homepage. I tend to like breadcrumb nav links that let you move up to the month in context or front.
@smokey I may be in the minority here, but I had not considered that Older/Left, Newer/Right pagination was mimicking/skeuomorphizing sinistrodextral media. All this time I assumed it had conformed to the run of a timeline’s x-axis.
@schuth I think that’s part of the reason why this remains “unresolved” after all of these years: everyone approaches it with a different metaphor/mental model; I could certainly be in a minority—of one, even. I’ve never thought about it as a timeline, and certainly in that light Older/Left, Newer/Right makes sense—although I personally still get hung up on the fact that you start at the top/front/most recent end of a the timeline, but the page numbers count up as you move back in time to older posts. I guess it’s a BCE timeline, then!
I just know that I would get confused on my own blog and end up clicking the wrong link when paging through a month looking for something, wondering why I’d ended up back on the page I’d read just before! So I had to do something to make it all make sense to me :-)
@smokey this has been a long standing confusion for me as well. If you asked me today, I would say that terms like “older posts” are irrelevant now for the most part.There are certainly special cases, but chronological order doesn’t seem to matter anymore, especially with everyone arriving at most blog posts via search anyway. It would be nice if search engines sorted chrono more often so you can be more sure you are getting the newest solution to a problem you are searching to solve. As far as th arrows at the bottom; my assumption is that left(previous) and right(next) is meant to mimic the back/forward of the browser control set? This may be one of those fun internet things that is a standard of 1000 different standards. 😀
@davextreme @frankm I’ve used “next/prev post” links on various blogs in a few of use-cases: 1) someone’s telling a chronological/ordered story or series, so it’s faster (one less click/pageload) to get to the next post that way, 2) I’ve followed a link to a post and want to see if there are similar posts (“more of the same”) adjacent, or 3) I’ve gotten to the bottom of a post and one of the linked posts there looks interesting.
Interestingly, these links are the structural/post design elements I most miss from corporate/siloed social media, in part because there’s no (useful) search, no monthly archives, etc., only an infinite timeline you can only ever read backwards starting from the beginning/current date. Each individual post on those platforms is lost and disconnected, devoid of context or linkage, orphaned and forgotten, even if it had context or more pieces at the time it was originally made….
@Burk Mimicing the browser may be it, too—although in a browser, forward (right) isn’t active unless you’ve already visited a page and then gone back after reading it, which in my mind breaks down on a blog since you’ve likely not visited/read those next/older posts before.
It’s beginning to look more and more like my brain is the only one that conceptualizes blog navigation that way (though I have seen some other blogs that do left/newer and right/older as I do, so…) ;-)
I get your point about “older” being less relevant in the era of arriving at things via search, too. I’m not advocating using it so much as a qualitative descriptor, but rather as a helpful signpost to clarify where you’re going if you do start browsing around a site after arrving on it (and, as I mentioned above, to make sure I don’t keep clicking the wrong link on my own blog! :-) ). Even if chronological order doesn’t itself matter, it’s still a useful way to help you understand where you are headed. Or maybe just to help me understand where I’m headed ;-)
@smokey My opinion chronology and archiving is what distinguishes a blog structure from other web sites. The word "log" implies an order. I personally can live without navigation links in posts. If I were to prioritize, for me some form of archive indexing is what I consider a higher priority. In two years from now if I want to see what I wrote in 2018 I would like an easy way to find that writing.