Introducing: Clutter!

By Shamus Posted Sunday Oct 1, 2006

Filed under: Notices 9 comments

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.

 


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9 thoughts on “Introducing: Clutter!

  1. Presumably you know that 95% of the trackbacks you’ll get will be spam.

  2. Shamus says:

    Yeah. They never had any problem finind the trackback link. I have to cope with them anyway.

  3. David V.S. says:

    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.

  4. BeckoningChasm says:

    I’m not even sure what a trackback is. I know what a halftrack is, though.

  5. Pixy Misa says:

    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.)

  6. Cineris says:

    I suggest moving the permalink to be on the title and put the trackback to be where the permalink currently is.

  7. Cineris says:

    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.

  8. Ernesto says:

    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.

  9. Alex M says:

    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.

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