Equinox of Insanity

I look at blog design the same way I look at the opening credits to TV shows: you should update the design each new season to reflect the fact that the geeky yet handsome best friend has become the chubby yet humorous sidekick. Granted, last year the blog went through several redesigns, but I attribute that to poor ratings, budget cuts, network interference, and the fact that I totally suck at design.

So: a new year, a new design.

My design suckage notwithstanding, I’m pretty happy with the redesign. The goal was to try and maintain the look & feel of the original, while improving functionality to account for my increased online girth. Also, I felt the site needed to be a lot more equnioxy (hence, the sun/moon thingies).

To start with, I decided to increase the font size and contract the text column. The intended effect is to improve readability, because, really, if you’re going to be reading this crap then I sort of owe it to you to make it as easy as possible. On your eyes, that is (your brain is, of course, fucked).

I was never a fan of the sidebar I’d built, and I’ve always had an affinity for those Hemingway-style footers with site content in them, so if you’re wondering where the archives and things like that have ended up then just head due south. In keeping with my personality, the footer got a bit… audacious. In some cases the footer is going to be larger than the posts above it, which I find charmingly delightful, proper user interface design techniques be damned.

New features, now dumped into the footer, include: my recent del.icio.us links, Flickr photos, monthly archives, recent posts, and some of my favorite posts. I was going to add some Klingon poetry too, but, crazy as this sounds, there isn’t a Wordpress plugin for that. Bummer.

I’ve redone the archive pages to be more usable, I hope. I’ve also switched from categorical filing of posts to a tag-based system, and added a much needed, though dubiously accurate, search function. This should make finding crap I wrote easier. Because I’m sure you’re just dying to look up my old posts about Thor’s Presidential Campaign (rumor has it he’s going to jump back into the race as an Independent after the primaries).

If you’re viewing the site with IE6 then there are going to be some minor problems due to my use of transparent PNGs. Sorry. Also, you should really look at upgrading your browser to something that doesn’t, who know, totally friggin’ suck ass. I recommend anything that isn’t Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about because you’re viewing the site through a feed reader, then here’s a screenshot of the new look:

Finally, I’m working on retconning old posts to work with the new design. Older articles might look totally stupid for a while. I mean, more stupid than usual. Just go with the flow. This should future-proof the site, in the event of subsequent updates.

Have a happy New Year, and enjoy. And by enjoy I mean, try not to vomit on the new carpet. Thanks.

— Nima

PS: If you hate the design let me know. The part of my brain that’s supposed to handle good taste is broken, as I’ve previously documented.

This is something I’ve considered writing at least five times now, but each time I just say “screw it” and go back to ogling Gong-Li’s titties and reading up on vampire peacocks. But this post by Shawn Blanc is going too far, and the pants are coming off¹: not having comments on your blog is a bad thing!

Look, if you have a blog but don’t have comments enabled you’re a douchebag. I’m sorry, but that’s what you are. Shawn Blanc seems like a nice dude, but he’s a douchebag because he doesn’t have comments enabled. John Gruber? Smart guy, good writer, excellent t-shirt maker, but also a pudgy douchebag. Paul Thurrott? Mac hating (to the point of hilarity) douchebag.

Bilateral communication is a design feature inherent to the Internet. It was designed so people could communicate with each other. Blog comments allow for that communication to take place. Comments allow for conversations. That is what the Internet was built for. By choosing not to have comments enabled on your site you are not only closing off a line of communication between yourself and your readers, but you’re also ignoring a fundamental quality of the Internet. It would be like operating a Macintosh without a mouse. Why?

Oh, Shawn Blanc tells us why:

More Time - One thing I love about having comments disabled on shawnblanc.net is how much time, energy and thought it frees up for me. I don’t have to check akismet. I don’t have to moderated, edit, or anything. Once I hit publish I’m done.

The whole point of Akismet, the comment spam blocking system that the makers of Wordpress designed and allow you to use for free, is that it’s automatic. I think most people would tell you that the time you’re trying to save is negligible, at most. I’ve only ever had to moderate one set of comments which I thought were inappropriate, and I’m a complete dick who’s just asking for ridicule with every post. Also, I’m incredibly well groomed, so it sort of balances itself out.

He continues:

A Gift to the Readers - If you’re a regular reader of a weblog there is this unspoken pressure that you ought to say something. (Did someone say national de-lurker week?

This is what drove me over the edge, and why I’m writing this idiotic post. This is the most asinine thing I’ve read all week (and I do read my own blog). There is no unspoken pressure to leave comments on blogs. There is sometimes spoken pressure, when I go to my friends and scream, “Why haven’t you posted a comment on my blog!” But I stopped doing that after I realized that no one loves me. At the time of this writing none of the last 13 posts that I’ve written has had comments, and yet I’m fairly certain a fair number of people have read those posts. Clearly, the pressure to comment is not so overwhelming that my audience feel inclined to comment for no reason.

Which brings me to his last point:

More Personal Communication - By not having comments it encoureges more genuine communication from the reader to the author via email or instant messenger.

I’m calling bullshit on this. Not having comments requires email or IM, because you have erected a wall up preventing the far more readily available form of communication — comments. To you an email or IM may be a more “genuine” form of communication, but I greatly disagree, and I’ll add that it’s an incredibly elitist notion to throw around at that. Also, it’s stupid.

People post comments when they have a reason to. They’re not being forced to by some mystical comment-fairy sitting on their monitor whispering to them to think of something witty to say or else she’ll rape them. They’re adding to the conversation. Whether it’s to tell their own story or to fill you in when you’re dumb, comments add value to your posts. Sometimes the most interesting tidbits are found in comments (John Gruber has on more than one occasion that I can recall specifically called out comments to posts as points of interest)².

Shawn mentioned the number of emails he’s received about whatever, and as one of the people who’s sent him an email I can say that it was actually a pain in the ass. It took a while to get a response, and the response I got was kind of an impersonal stock reply, which quite frankly I thought was a “fuck you”. It turned out that it wasn’t (though I probably deserved it if it was) but it was a total waste of everyone’s time (including his). Had comments been enabled on his site I could have just commented with a correction, it would have been public, and he wouldn’t have had to do anything if he didn’t want to. My comment would have added to his post and that would be that. In fact, if he had comments enabled on his site, I wouldn’t have to sit here like a doofus writing this post. I would have just said something to this effect, but more succinctly and with less collateral damage, in his comments and it would be part of the public discourse.³

What does not having comments say to your readers? To me it says you are uninterested in hearing what anyone other than you has to say; that you want a soapbox from which to speak at the world. If that’s the case, then more power to you, but don’t tell me you’re doing me a favor by not having comments. You’re not. You’re not doing yourself any favors either. You’re not using the Internet to it’s potential, and denying yourself what can be a very substantive form of communication. At the very least, comments make error correction easier, and accuracy can be a good thing.

Let me just conclude this ridiculous rant by saying that even traditional print media (newspapers and magazines) now on the Net have all adopted comment systems, as have social networking sites, and of course blogs. So choosing to make commandments instead of conversations puts you in a very small minority. A minority which counts Paul Thurrott in it’s number. Just think about if that’s where you want to be…

1. As you can imagine, they weren’t on in the first place, so this should be taken as simply a figure of speech. A sexy figure of speech.↩
2. Along those lines, I think my crowing achievement on the Internet has been (inadvertently) starting a fight between Robert Scoble and Mike Davidson via comments. Nice!↩
3. I ran into this recently with John Gruber, regarding issues surrounding several statement he had made about Courier VS Courier New. I just ended up emailing him, which has now become our little secret since neither of us actually posted about it. His having comments would have solved that.↩