Ikiru Design

lindseywb (ASA)

Perhaps I’m the only one who has noticed. Perhaps others have noticed but decided to remain silent. Perhaps others who noticed weren’t silent, but spoke while I wasn’t paying attention. (To be fair, a few noticed and spoke up.)

Whatever the case may be, I have an announcement: “Zoom” is replacing “Increase Text Size” in most browsers. And though I confess to initial ambivalence, I’m increasingly certain this is a good thing.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, click on View and look for “Increase Text Size.” Can’t find it: congratulations you’re using IE7, Opera 9.5, or Firefox 3. (Safari still seems tied to text size.) If you can find it (or a similar), you’re looking at old technology.

Now, this will all be largely irrelevant to those who don’t spend hours tinkering with CSS, but this does has some important implications for us that do. Many web designers — I count myself among them — have gotten into the habit of sizing as many things as they can with ems.

Sizing with ems allows people who need bigger text to get it, without breaking your design. If your browser still has “Increase text size,” you can play with it on this page. You’ll notice that everything scales. (Well, almost everything. The divider won’t, more on that choice can be found here.) With the design I’m using, this is a relatively unimpressive feat, but it does demonstrate the point.

There are problem with designing with ems, primarily that images — barring some fancy footwork — won’t change like other elements. This is why zoom is much more useful than “Increase text size:” it scales images as wells. Further, this means that designers using ems are becoming, essentially, outdated. Using pxs or even pts will now (well really, when “Zoom” browsers completely replace “Increase Text Size” browsers) have the exact same efficacy as styling with ems.

And now, if your cared, you definitely know. And if you didn’t, you still know. Congratulations on learning something.

It’s a problem that all internet users face from time to time. I, seemingly incapable of reading anything but a computer screen, face this problem all the time.

The problem is essentially this: page views are what determines advertising rates on the internet. The more page views a website has, the more they can charge advertisers. Thus they have a perverse incentive to stretch even the smallest article over many pages.

I loathe this practice, and as a consequence I’ve thought about it quite a lot, and so I’m here to offer the internet some salient advice on the topic.

• Paginate responsibly. I offer for you consideration, a list of the top 25 band logos of all time. As the rather famous Jason Kottke prefaced his link to the site, only offering one image per page is absurd. Surely it’ll give you a massive number of page views for those who are willing to click all the way through, but you also risk a massive number of people quiting after three clicks.
• Make a single page view available. This strike me as a reader as absolutely required, but I’m appalled by the hordes of respectable sites that refrain from doing so.
• If I must, I’ll use “Print View.” This is a double loss for most publisher, who (thankfully) refrain from putting an ads on their printable page. Unfortunately, these views are also ugly and unoptimized for screen reading (that is, if they were optimized for reading at all).
• I’ll leave if it’s too hard. If you offer a single page view, you’re only half way there. You also need to make it easy to find. Putting it at the top of the page is probably best, putting it at the bottom of the page makes sense. Whatever you do, don’t hide it or I’m apt to give up on reading your content entirely.

Practical Examples

If someone understands how to paginate on the web, it’s the New York Times. Not only do they offer a single-page view, and not only is there a good amount of line-spacing, but they’ve made the button easy to find. Right at the top of every single paginated article (and right to the right of this text) they have a convenient “Single Page” link for me to click before I even start reading.

Another, but different, style is offered by The Weekly Standard. The conservative weekly’s website could perhaps use a face lift, but their pagination policy’s sensible. Though the don’t offer a simple single page view, they never extend an article past page two. The effect of this is that though a reader must “turn” the page, even for long articles you don’t have to “turn the page” 24 times.

Also of note is an online “magazine” I love, Slate. Because I’ve confessed to being a fan, I can and will now browbeat them a bit. You should know that the average Slate article is one or two pages long. Now consider this: after the first page, right by the pagination links they offer a “single page view” that snaps to after the end of page one. This policy is more sensible than the one in use at The New Yorker (where the “single page” link in the same position takes you to the top of the single page view), but it’s flawed. After all, for a two page article — again, Slate’s average length — this has essentially the same effect as click onto page two. If articles were routinely three or more pages long, this would make sense. But as an avid reader I feel confident in saying that this is rarely the case.

Surely it’s hard to get it right, this choice between pageviews and reader satisfaction. Most websites do an admirable job. But that doesn’t mean I won’t still be a little bitter that they aren’t putting my desires first.

jquiz

I — and many other people who sometimes opine on blog design issues — think its rather useful to have images on posts. They’re a quick introduction to your topic, a way to jazz up your text, and a great way stand out at least a little bit.

And if you’re like me, you’re not exactly a prolific photographer with thousands of images that you can use for all kinds of topic you might write about. Also, you probably don’t want to go about buying photos to use. In such a case you have two choices, one legal and one not. (I’m actually ignoring the existence of free stock photos, because I’ve never found them terribly useful.)

The illegal — or at least problematic — way is to take them from other website. One thing I used to do, was hotlink directly to Yahoo!’s images. And I’ve also used Google Image Search, without regard for who owned the image or what have you. If it looks roughly like I wanted I’d upload it to my own server and use it.

And so now, assuming we’re not pirates, we have a problem in need of a solution. And there is a very easy solution: Creative Commons images. As you very well may know, Creative Commons is a license in which the creator give away some — but crucially not all — rights to what they’ve produced.

The easiest and best ways to find Creative Commons licensed images is with a Flickr Advanced Search. Down on the bottom of that page, you’ll find an option for Creative Commons licensed images. For myself, I always choose “Find content to use commercially” simply because I want the least stringent and problematic license. What you find there doesn’t exactly leave you home free. Almost all — perhaps all, I don’t know — CC images require a citation. Some also require other things, but this is the most important requirement from a design perspective.

Designing Images with Citations

DWQ

We’ve established the need for citations on images you might use on your blog. And there are indeed a number of ways to cite. Many conscientious people lacking some know-how simply add a “The image on this post is from Mr. Flickr” at the end their posts. But for myself, I wanted something at least a bit more elegant than that.

For inspiration, I’d always liked the way that The Economist’s website displays the citations on its images (see random example), and decided to mirror it. There were mild changes I made beyond that — for my own aesthetic preferences, but that was the layout — and CSS code — to which I referred while devising this solution — which you may notice in the out-of-place-photos of Optimus Prime and Canadian geese, each lazily stolen from Frozen Toothpaste entries (here and here).

I have two basic ways, both of which work essentially like this in WordPress’s “code” editor for a given post:
<p class="rightcite">
<span><a href="http://www.dummyurl.com/">Dummy Photographer</a></span>
<img src="http://www.myadress.com/images/dummy.jpg" />
</p>

As you may be able to tell from this rather simple (X)HTML, this simple creates a paragraph while will carry the styling from the CSS class “rightcite” — more on what that means later. The next line is the photographers name, with a link to the URL that they want used for citation. For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter what’s on that line so long as it’s wrapped with the “span” tag, again used for styling. The third line is simply the image, preferably hosted on your servers, though there’s no reason it must be.

A note: The use of the paragraph (“p”) division rather than the more traditional “div” simply because WordPress seems to choke on anything but the paragraph division. If you’re using a different content management system, feel free to see if it can handle the use of a “div” rather than a “p.”

Now, we must style this stuff so that it looks good one our site:
p.rightcite {
display: block;
float: right;
margin: .1em 0 .1em .5em;
background: #f1f1f1;
padding: .2em;
border: 1px solid black;
}
p.rightcite span {
display: block;
text-align: right;
font-size: .8em;
color: #555;
margin: -.5em 0 -.4em 0;
}

As you may be able to tell, the first set of styles is for every part of the “rightcite” paragraph. The crucial things to note are the “display” and “float” properties. The rest just makes it look the way I want, but those two make the paragraph float to the right.

The second set of styles is for our citation, again the most important part here is the “display” attribute, which prevents the citation from floating all over the map. The rest is again mostly for aesthetic concerns.

Now, you may be interested to see a similar thing for a centered image, which is just a bit more complicated.

p.centercite {
display: block;
text-align: center;
margin: .8em auto;
width: 468px;
}

The crucial thing here is the width declaration, which is needed to keep our “span” text from floating away. Obviously, by declaring a width for this paragraph you’ll have to keep your images to that width for proper functioning. You can change that width in an implementation on your own blog, but I wouldn’t recommend changing it once you’ve decided what width you’ll use.

There are some other notable ways to do a similar thing as all this with different methods. The most interesting and prominent in my mind is Derek Punsalan’s, which uses custom fields. I’ll leave the explanation of that technique to him.

fdecomite

If there’s one problem in this ever-growing blogosphere, it’s that sites are so easy to create that no one worries too much when they die. So they continue to sit out here with the living, quickly becoming useless piles of bones that get in the way of the rest of us.

This is a problem in itself, but it’s one with which we can cope. We can cope so long as these bones aren’t intentionally made to look more alive than they are. So long as bones show themselves to clearly be bones, we living members are pretty able to avoid those we don’t really want to look at.

But a problem arises when you hide that your website is a skeleton. When you decide that you’ll get rid of post times or — and this is far, far worse — dates. Then when I come upon your site a quick glance around doesn’t tell me if I’m dealing with a skeleton or a living, breathing, changing blog

And if there’s one thing I less like than a dead blog, it’s a blog that doesn’t quickly fess to its deadness. Some otherwise great blogs and themes have this problem. I really like a lot about Brian Gardener’s Revolution theme, but I hate that no version puts publication times or dates on all the articles shown on the front page. Perhaps this was intentional or a simple oversight, but I don’t like it.

This is the internet age when lifespan of content is measured is hours, or — if we’re to be very generous — days. In such an atmosphere not telling me when your content was published is like admitting that you’re not a part of these exciting and rapidly changing times.

In some situations you could get away without times. Yahoo!, for example, doesn’t offer them on it’s homepage. And the Washington Post and LA Times are both lax about the times their stories were written. But they’ve got a great deal of built-in trust as well-known sources of information, and arguably important ones. A visitor can easily guess that, at most, the content is a day old.

But visitors to MyRandomSite don’t know who you are or what you do. They don’t know that they can trust that you’re not a pile of bones. So you need to tell them. Not much is needed; seeing “March 5, 2008” on a post is enough in most situations. That way I can tell that if nothing else, your site’s not a pile of bones. Maybe you’ve not updated in a few days or hours, but I know when you were last seen breathing. In a place where content’s cheap and credibility costs a great deal, that little bit matters a lot.

So please, bloggers, webmasters, web designer, and spectators, put a time stamp on your content. On your front page. Tell me that you’re not expired and I’m more likely to stick around and give what you’re doing some consideration. Thank you.