Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
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Weblog calendars
Seth and I had an exchange regarding the placement of weblog calendars on news pages this morning, and he suggested I post my comments regarding the issue. For those not up on the terminology, weblogs are news pages like this one. Post data is the organizing principle behind a weblog, and thus a calendar is needed to navigate through the history of posts. In most typical weblog designs, the weblog calendar appears in the left or right column of the site along with other navigation elements. I prefer to put my calendars at the bottom of the posts ( as it is on this site ) and here was my explanation of why….
Weblog calendars are a real UI problem for anyone but weblog writers who are familiar with them.
I’ve found that _no one_ in the non-weblog community figures them out. No one that visits our Babies
home page ( a Manila site ) figures out that you can go to past pages using the calendar. It also
generally really disturbs people when they visit one that hasn’t had posts on the current day, and the
“wrong” day ( ie, not today ) is highlighted in the calendar.After asking a number of people about it last year, I discovered it’s a positioning problem. If you visit
the weblog, and scroll down the page to the end of the posts and decide you want to read more past
posts, the links ( ie, the calendar ) should be there at the end of the page for you. It doesn’t make
sense to have to scroll back up to find navigation…so people just assume that’s the end of the line.The only thing this positioning is worse for is actually paging through the archives day by day — but I
really don’t think anyone does that — or at least it’s the far lesser problem than the appropriateness of
the navigation on the current page of the weblog.Also, it screws up the positioning of the standard site navigation in the navbar to have it at the top of
that column…so people get confused trying to leave the weblog and navigate the rest of the site.
May 17th, 2002 at 11:27 am
This topic sparked a discussion over at Seth’s site…if anyone’s interested.
May 17th, 2002 at 11:40 am
On 5/17/02, Greg Pierce said:
>This topic sparked a discussion over at Seth’s site…if anyone’s
>interested.
Frankly, even I’m not interested. I almost asked those guys to take it
somewhere else.
Topics like that make my wife and family wonder why they’re members of my site. <tt>:-)</tt>
Seth
May 17th, 2002 at 7:35 pm
Sorry, Seth, you should have mentioned something.
May 18th, 2002 at 8:37 am
On 5/17/02, Mark Morgan said:
>Sorry, Seth, you should have mentioned something.
I would have, if it really mattered.