jbsegal | I _hate_ newest-on-top blogs. (AKA: Good UI is hard. But not THIS HARD.)

It's hard to express how much I hate the most common Blog/CMS layout on the web - newest article on top.
It's genuinely hard, actually, because I hate it less than Nazis and less than the wingnut right, and less than religious orthodoxies of any flavor, but I hate it more _often_ because I encounter it, directly, _every_fucking_day_ while the others are generally more abstract in the interactions I have with them, and usually mediated through those same crappily laid-out blogs.

When I discover a blog I want to read all of - or even that I want to investigate from the beginning and see if it's interesting - I do NOT want to A) have to grovel though the archive tabs to find the oldest month, B) have to go page by page through that month to the oldest entries for that month and - most importantly - C) scroll to the end of the page and then page up until I find the top of the 1st article, read it - by scrolling down, of course - and then page back up, passing the top of the 1st article, searching for the top of the 2nd article, and then reading that one and repeating this whole mother-fucking dance over and fucking over a-fucking-gain.
http://www.scoutingny.com/ is a particularly obvious example of why this sucks SO MUCH. The entries are _long_, they're full of pictures, and as you're paging back up looking for the start of the article, the header is quite easily lost in the noise.

I know that many blogs have some sort of calendar interface where you can see what days have posts and go to them. Know where most of those live? In a fucking side column where, if the entry you're reading is longer than a screen, you have to scroll back up again to get to it.

Within about a month of signing up for Livejournal in Feb '02, I'd found their option to display the friends page in oldest-on-top layout. I set it and have been happy ever since - except that they don't have any way to set it in any of their mobile apps that I've found - including, damn-it-all - on m.livejournal.com/read/friends.

And then there are webcomics. The people there KNOW you're going to be reading the fucking content in order, one after another after another. There are numerous firefox (and probably other browser?) add-ons to make scrolling through well-designed pages like that easy. There are numerous (innumerous?) webcomics that make sure that they DON'T WORK.

XKCD does the right thing - more or less. It plays well with the AutoPagerize greasemonkey script - due perhaps to this line in the page code:
<a href="/2/" accesskey="n">Next ></a>
It's not perfect, because the "next" button at the bottom - if I wasn't using AutoPagerize - moves with the size of the strip, but the next button on TOP (2 of them! Ooh, the profligate waste of bits!) stays in the same place, so I could hit 'Home' should I need to. (and he has keyboard navigation, too, I believe?)

Any of Shaenon Garrity's strips? Yeah. Not so much.
The URL of the first week of Skin Horse is:
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/shaenongarrity/skinhorse/series.php?view=archive&chapter=25110
If you dig through the source looking for next?
<a name="strip6"><a href="redirect.php?type=comic&installment_ID=95735&whichbutton=next">
- from 25110 to 95735! Clever! Intuitive. Useless.
(And, at least on my brower, if you hit End (to skip the comments and find the 'next' button)? You have to page back up to get to it because there's an absurd amount of whitespace after the nav buttons but below the footer.)

I wish I could give an example of a blog that gets it right, but I really don't know of any.

Why is this so HARD???

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Something weird with the html, there.

I pay attention to the

suggestions community, and I don't remember one about oldest first and mobile lj. Might be worth posting.

How do you do oldest first?

I'd be interested in knowing this as well. I just went through LJ's settings and journal style pages and couldn't find it, despite their highly intuitive and well-organized layout *cough* *splutter*. If that setting is enabled, at what point does it start?

What I really want is for LJ to track which entries I've read and when, so I don't have to check back for new comments on interesting posts..

if it's an interesting post you can also turn on comment tracking. it's the tack icon.

somewhere you can also set the url to include the # of comments, so if you've already clicked into it it will show read until there are new comments.

http://www.livejournal.com/customize/options.bml
Additional Options
> Order of entries shown on a Friends page
> "Most recent first" means the newest entry is at the top of the page, "Least Recent First" means the newest entry is at the bottom of the page.
> Order of days shown on a Day page
> Order of months shown on a Year page

This may be a per-theme option. I won't use any theme that doesn't have it.
I haven't done any meaningful customization to mine since picking this one years ago. I may be a neophile, but I don't change things like this for no reason.

It does appear to be per-theme, since mine doesn't have it. Which theme are you using?

http://www.livejournal.com/customize/?layoutid=4601331&show= Smooth Sailing

Hmmm. To my surprise, I find I prefer newest-first most of the time. Oldest-first would be useful if I'm catching up after a hiatus, but unfortunately changing it is non-trivial enough to not make it worth it.

Since I never go to actual pages of blogs or webcomics except by click through from google reader, this pretty much doesn't affect me anymore. Google reader organizes it either way, and I have mine set up oldest to newest.

Mainly it's an archives thing.I'm ok with the front page having the newest story at the top.. but when I go to read the old ones.. hell, what I end up with is, more or less - let us say there are 15 entries, 6-per-page -

15 9 3
14 8 2
13 7 1
12 6
11 5
10 4

So in order to get to the 1st entry, I have to go forward 2 pages, hit end, and scroll back up to the top of the 1st entry, which is someplace in the middle of the page.

Oy.

Can you read your friends' friends-locked LJ posts with google reader? I abandoned the idea of using Google reader a long time ago, when the answer was "no". If this has changed, I'll probably start using google reader.

I expect the design is consistent with "most common usage" practices: *most* readers hitting a website are here explicitly for the newest entries, and a significantly smaller number of users look to work forward from an older starting point. Ergo, design-wise, it pisses off far *fewer* readers to start with current entries, and make only those who *want* to get up to speed from older material be the ones who have to do the work of getting there.

Fine. The front page can be new-to-old.

But the ARCHIVES???

No. That's just bullshit lack-of-thought. :/

I am the sort of person who takes the software as it comes, because so many of my employers have required me to work with Microsoft products. So it never even occurred to me that I was allowed to hate the LIFO blog format. Now I wonder why the heck you can't have a sorting toggle on each page, so readers can do whichever they want. It wouldn't need to be in the readers if it were in the blog formats. If the LIFO can get standardized (and it sure has) the toggle could become a standard thing, too. For instance, the comments sections on Salon can be read either LIFO or FIFO.

I have been annoyed with it always taking three or four steps to call up each comic if you want to read the back catalog in order.

My personal pet peeve (the last-on-top doesn't bother me as long as the (for example) webcomic has a "first" button from which I can navigate forward) is webcomics who post by date, eg Girl Genius (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20100906). I much prefer the format used in eg Order of the Stick (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0744.html) - it makes it much easier to (a) point towards a specific comic, especially if I'm reading forward in stages and (b) remember where I was.

But that's just me :^)

Hey, yyyymmdd is SO much better than mmddyyyy - See Something Positive for an example.

Oh, and if more blogs had '1st' buttons, that'd absolutely make life better... as long as the "next" button always did the right thing.

Look at various webcomics that intersperse comics with blog entries, using (usually) a blogging platform - Digger seems to be one. It's VERY easy to end up on a not-a-comic page.

{sigh}

However, Girl Genius's archives are set up to make it easy to navigate to a particular point in the storyline, by giving you a descriptive list of links to points in the storyline. OOTS just gives you a big list of strip titles, which are generally cutesy comments on the content thereof and completely useless for finding the point where any particular thing happens.

Oh sure. The point that I'm making isn't the nagivation method of those two particular comics, it's the point of indexing by dates rather than by a set sequence of numbers. For a comic lacking good navigation buttons (which both those sites have), being able to increment the URL by 1 for the next comic is nice.

And, to quibble a little bit, some of the Girl Genius links are pretty easy to recognize (Maxim Buys a Hat comes to mind), but many aren't (Zeetha! doesn't tell me anything useful), although I do wish OoTS organized things more than they do.

because of the blog software makers' assumptions:
- blog posts will not be giant trailing affairs
- people will read blog content at least 3-4 times a week
- people will not want to sit down and read someone's blog the way they read a book

in your case, they're obviously wrong.

i would think it would be relatively simple, given a set of blog content (say, in a database), to create pages that would display it last-entry first or first-entry first. just nobody who makes the blog layout software has caught on.

Feed the blog into Google Reader. Be happy. :)

Or, you know, _any_ feed reader.

I _hate_ newest-on-top blogs. (AKA: Good UI is hard. But not THIS HARD.)

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