Something Awful and permalinks
I was reading a nice article today, shown to me by my good friend Uni Will. Engines of Grief. It started out like your usual anti-moron rant and degraded into talk of church-bombing.
The article isn't the main point of this post. But it's the starting point. The main point is a usability problem with Something Awful (SA).
The problem, is that there are no permalinks anywhere near the articles displayed on the home page. They should be there. People like me will not link to an article on the home page of a blog. It's just wrong for so many reasons I will not get into now. There's a disadvantage of the lack of permalinks already, less incoming links.
Getting the permalink: click News Archives, click January 2005, scroll down and hope that the script that updates the archives has been run since the article was posted. If not, click the last article and increment the number until the article you want is displayed.
I don't know about anybody else but I wouldn't do that every time I wanted to link to an article, I'd just not bother.
I simply propose that articles on the home page have permalinks available.
I must confess that I do not hold SA in highest regard, but by Space the home page needs permalinks!
And here is my short and hopefully informative and persuasive email:
The article isn't the main point of this post. But it's the starting point. The main point is a usability problem with Something Awful (SA).
The problem, is that there are no permalinks anywhere near the articles displayed on the home page. They should be there. People like me will not link to an article on the home page of a blog. It's just wrong for so many reasons I will not get into now. There's a disadvantage of the lack of permalinks already, less incoming links.
Getting the permalink: click News Archives, click January 2005, scroll down and hope that the script that updates the archives has been run since the article was posted. If not, click the last article and increment the number until the article you want is displayed.
I don't know about anybody else but I wouldn't do that every time I wanted to link to an article, I'd just not bother.
I simply propose that articles on the home page have permalinks available.
I must confess that I do not hold SA in highest regard, but by Space the home page needs permalinks!
And here is my short and hopefully informative and persuasive email:
Dear webmaster,
I came across a small but annoying usability problem with Something Awful. I noticed that none of the articles on the home page are displayed with a permalink. There aren't even permalinks available in the archives for the latest articles (at the time of writing), I had to manually increment the article number.
I expect people would be more likely to link to or bookmark particular articles if permalinks were more readily available.
Tom
posted by holizz at 05:07
1 Comments:
thisisbradford.co.uk has exactly the same problem - the links on the home page are not permanent - they change content daily. To get the true permalinks, you have to bury through the archives. It's the same woth thisisyork.co.uk so I imagine it uses the sam CMS.
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