A side note: I found Ernesto Burden when that site linked to me. I then relized that in many cases I don’t really “find” sites – they find me and I discover them via trackback. I also realized that I was not helping things by hiding the ugly trackback / permalink stuff in small print at the bottom of the individual post, off the front page, where most people never see it. I dislike this visual clutter, but it does make the blog more useful.
I’m still not happy about this. I dislike the new clutter, although really I’m not wasting screen space. The place where the permalink / trackback stuff is was always empty space before.
As an engineer, this is a familiar tradeoff. Ugly and functional vs. attractive and inaccessable. I really need to stop being such a prima donna and go for functional. I’m starting to act like a Mac user*.
* I only said that to annoy you.
Artless in Alderaan
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Starcraft 2: Rush Analysis
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Presumably you know that 95% of the trackbacks you’ll get will be spam.
Yeah. They never had any problem finind the trackback link. I have to cope with them anyway.
To my eyes it’s too much clutter. I seldom follow a trackback link on someone else’s blog (and don’t have them on my own blog).
But then, I have a headache. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive at the moment.
Would the phrases not be as glaring if they were in a half-faded gray or other dark color, instead of bright blue?
Or could you use a picture that means trackback? You do so well with the dice, topic pictures, etc.
I’m not even sure what a trackback is. I know what a halftrack is, though.
Trackbacks suck.
(I need to get them fixed over at munu, but we get – at last count – 5 million trackback spams a month, which is a bit of a problem.)
I suggest moving the permalink to be on the title and put the trackback to be where the permalink currently is.
Eh… It seems the permalink is on the title (did a quick test and didn’t see anything pop up the first time). Still, I stand with my suggestion.
I have a love/hate relationship with trackback… mostly because whenever I open up the security enough for it to work right, I get so much spam I end up shutting it off. It’s great in concept, though.
I have to say that trackbacks are the worst idea conceived. The comments section is supposed to be there for people to post comments, but instead, on many blogs all I see are snippets of the same blog I just read! For a while, I was wondering what that even was, before I found out that they are supposed to be trackbacks.
I mean, seriously, leave the comments section for comments, and if you want trackback functionality on your site, at least separate them in a place far away from the comments.