Sillyness, werd

Chris,

First off, great article. This just another fine example of quality content I’ve come to expect from you. Secondly, on the subject at hand, I myself do use Bloglines to keep track of my daily reading, but you know what. I don’t use it to read the entries. I simply utilize it as a means of know when there is something new to read on my favorite sites. Once I see there is something new (as long as it’s not just an update) I click on the link to take me to the site to do my reading. I like reading a sites content in it’s home environment displayed as it was meant to be displayed. The idea of just using excerpts is a good one I think.

Now, I do disagree with you on the statement that sites like Joshuaink and Binary Bonsai would not be as popular if the design was up to par. I enjoy the content for what it is, content. The design is secondary in my eyes. Sure it is nice to see the content surrounded by flowers or pin-up girls, but I would still read those blogs even if it was minimalistic such as the Sillyness here.

That is my $0.02 on the matter. Thanks for the good reading Chris.

In general, I consider it a matter of respect to visit the sites. I spend hours or days on my design and I want it to be seen. If all I wanted was to distribute text, I’d use e-mail or a newsgroup.
In my mind, design is content. How you say something can be as important as what you say. Having worked in theatre for much of my life I can tell you that the exact same words, presented in different ways, are very different things.
Maybe this stems from my own focus on design. I’m not a writer, and have no desire to be. What I write is for myself and my friends. If others find it interesting, great. If not, I don’t care. But my designs… those I take pride in.

I totally and fully agree with you on this 100%. I’ve always had issues with displaying the full post on my syndication feeds; I’d rather have people read only an excerpt too and click to my site to read the whole thing. Content without design and design without content make for an incomplete web site experience, in my opinion, and only when I get both do I really enjoy the site as a whole.

F*cking right, you are !!! And besides readers experience consideration, what would be the fun for us, Bloggers, if we lose this feeling of constant unsatisfaction about the design of our pages ?

Chris (the author said): “And yes there are many visitors to our sites that care nothing about the design, but I still maintain that the design can amplify the content even for them.”

Yes! This idea that design is only for some people is a total misinterpretation of what design is. Design is not a thing in itself, in the way that visual art is — design is the visual construction and organization of content. We design content to communicate it more effectively to our audience.

I use NetNewsWire to read most sites and often check the site through it anyway (it is a simple right arrow click after all) if I see something which vaguely makes me think its worth looking at the site. Sometimes this can be a shock after the extreme legibility in NNW.
I can honestly say that theres a few sites which I have subscribed to in NNW, then discovered theyre excerpt so Ive persevered with opening the full text in a tab to read later. This lasted for a while but then in a fit of pique at being irritated by the barrier to the content Ive actually removed them from NNW - never to be read again.

As per habits, I read the content in my feed reader (NNW) if the content is there. If its an excerpt I almost always visit the site without even reading the excerpt - full well knowing that I can catch up when the page loads.

One thing to consider is the fact that Firefox has live bookmarks, which helps keep people up-to-date but does not provide the entire content nor an excerpt. Firefox is cross platform, so everyone can take advantage of that functionality.

However, Safari RSS now makes it even easier to separate design from content. I love the tool, hate the premise. I love using it, hate knowing that people are using it to view my content. Advertisers must be biting their nails. If Firefox did the same thing, advertisers would REALLY be biting their nails.

Either way, if you’re “thing” is content distribution and syndication, RSS is KILLER. If you’re “thing” is a pretty way to talk about how your cat hates milk, then RSS can make you crazy.

If I was a Windows user, I’d use Firefox to keep up-to-date most likely.

man tonite I was thinking the exact same thing when I was in my wp admin, and was contemplating the same scenarios. one really good thing about the realm of innovation is that its caused us to continually re-evaluate what makes for good design and organization/presentation of info/content. zeldmans rant on tag clouds is a similar comparison.

and shawns comment regarding content, is a good reminder (for me at least) to remind myself that some visitors are just simply content hungry and see presentation as secondary, which for me, I tend to pay more attention to well presented content.

good food 4 thought.

Arno,

There is always that drive to redesign, don’t I know it!

Aubrey,

And that is my main point. I would like to find a good balance between giving my readers power, but also ensuring the content is delivered perserving my original vision.

John,

First off welcome to the ranks of Silly Commenters. While I agree completely with your assesment, there are very few people who use syndication for update and discovery. It is becoming an alternative viewing method entirely, which is where my frustration comes from!

Shawn,

Wait, you’re not allowed to disagree with me! Seriously though I get what you are saying about the sites, and that is great. I am not sure how widespread that sentiment is, it would be intersting to get a poll going.

And I like how you use bloglines, more of what John was mentioning earlier. And believe me your thoughts are worth a good deal more than 0.02!

Clint,

Good point about Zeldman, although on taxonomy and clouding I think he is a bit off… don’t tell him I said that though. And yes there are many visitors to our sites that care nothing about the design, but I still maintain that the design can amplify the content even for them.

Joen,

What am I going to do with you? As for feed readers, you and I are the same. I have never used feed readers and won’t. I just lose something when seperated from the designers sensibilities.

Wow, that is a wonderful point about presentation, I can definately see that. One point of contention though, the days of “interactivity” being on the site and not through the reader are numbered. There is already one feed reader that lets you comment on articles from it, bypassing the site altogether.

The day is coming when you will never have to crack a browser to interact with this site, or any other.

That is a day I dread.

One must decide, when building their blog, whether getting the word out or getting the visitors to the site is the primary goal. I think to try and design a site to communicate something in addition to the writing and then cripple it by stuffing your content into an antiseptic RSS feed is a waste of the designer’s time. Ultimately it’s your readers that will decide how they want to consume the site. If you can figure out a design and function and, dang I hate this buzzword, “experience” to give your readers as a way of enticing them to visit, then you have something great. If you are a web designer, you want folks to see your stuff. If you just want to blab, then a simple design and basic RSS is enough.

I’m rambling here, so I guess I’ll just summarize by saying that I think that RSS will mature and evolve, giving consumers and designers alike more choices. I want to let my readers have the choice, so maybe I should have one feed available for excerpts and another feed available for the whole ball of wax. Thinking further down the road, perhaps the creation of XML-based blogging tools and RSS readers will give us all even more choices.

I like your concept of “weblog schizophrenia”, Chris. I’m one of those. I’ve yet to decide if my blog is a personal soapbox, a WordPress resource, or a potpourri of unrelated flea market items. I’ve kind of lost my voice. For sites where their purposes and goals are much clearer, decisions about design for visits and design for remote consumption are probably “easier”.

Did I make any sense at all? :p

I found Craig’s remarks very interesting. Knowing what your website is “for” is an important step that, it seems, few people take. I recognize that I’m a weird one in this respect. My website is for me. I’ve never cared, on almost any of the many websites I’ve had over the years, about driving up traffic, getting more hits, having my counter.pl spin faster, or whatever the metaphor was in that particular time. I make websites for myself.

My blog, in particular, if for myself. Writing helps me think. The fact that my family and friends can keep up on what I’m doing is cool too, but it’s mostly for myself.

When I got slashdotted (the most recent time - the whole PHP thing) it changed for a brief time how I wrote. I had in mind this larger audience of strangers, and it colored what I thought I could say. Eventually, that irritated me, and I’m back to writing just for myself.

Of course, one must keep in mind who is the audience. For example, I know that my boss reads my blog, and I’m sure that colors, to some small degree, what I say about work, if anything. The fact that he’s a friend, too, probably makes that less of a problem.

But one must also be aware that anything you can really is going on your permanent record, in a way that was never possible in 3rd grade when I put ink in Sue’s hair.

Oh, great, now that’s on my permanent record, too.

Well, I have yet to read everyone else’s bit to say; I’ll have to do that later. I read blogs via a reader. If the article provokes me to comment, such as today, I visit to make a comment. If not, I move on. I just have too many sites that I visit regularly to pull them all up in my browser.

Very few sites that use excerpts get my traffic — - and those are really good writers, usually, or else a particular bit that has piqued my interest and won’t let go.

Most often, sites that give me excerpts get skipped altogether. Please don’t.

A while ago I was thinking the same thing, but then I decided to use full-text RSS.
The reason is, as Joen said, because my readers must be able to decide how they want to read my content: I’d love if they all - well, they’re not that many ;) - read it through the website so that they’d also get a look at the design, but if they prefer to read it on a feed reader, why should I put up a barrier?

I also thought about how I use feeds. I use NNW and usually, I read the first couple of lines and then open the page in a browser to finish the reading.
Sometimes, I don’t open the website and keep reading in NNW, but that’s mostly for news websites like Slashdot. If I like how a website is designed, I visit it no matter if I can have a full-text RSS or not.

Hmm…I’m getting lazy, or stupid, or both, but I find myself using fewer and fewer plugins these days because I can’t keep track of all the changes I need to make all over the place.

Could someone write a brain plugin for me? Please? :\

Some good discussion has been coming out of this article, and I thank each of you for taking the time to share your thoughts.

I think this gives us all something to think about in the days ahead, issues of content control, thematic design and authors prerogative are just a few that come to mind.

Yes it is a delimma. In all honesty I don’t really mind excerpts, I’ll click through if I find it interesting.

I use bloglines, and I still end up clicking through to read the story if I like the site. If they site is poorly designed (low contrast) then I read it in my reader.