Entries Tagged 'Readable' ↓

From Blork, a great follow-up to my complaints about Snap.com the other day: How To Disable Snap Shots on Blogs. Step-by-step instructions about how to spare your readers from this annoying “feature”.

Dear users of Snap.com,

Please stop!

It is annoying, provides me (your reader) with no benefit, and in fact makes it radically less likely that I will read your post - the stupid pop-up windows obscure your text and make it difficult to read the pearls of wisdom you are trying to communicate.

Best,
Michael

Scott Rosenberg takes up the case in his post, Terror of tinyurl.

From the earliest days of the Web to the present, there’s been a fundamental split between people who get the value of “human-readable URLs” and people who don’t.[...]
Today, though, we’re taking a step backwards, or at least sideways, in the cause of human readability, thanks to the growing popularity of the “tinyurl.”

I have had this discussion (arguing for human-readable URLs) with well-intentioned but clueless developers so many times it borders on the absurd. In fact, Nadia and I were just discussing it last night! Like Rosenberg, I understand why it’s important in the twitterverse, but outside of that relatively limited context, tinyurl is a user-hostile pain in the backside.