Assorted bullshit about video games, language, music, and some other unabashedly personal shit. And maybe some stuff that's kind of funny? I don't know. I just don't fucking know, alright? Would you give me a fucking break? Jesus, Mom.
You can also find me:
I also write Britishisms, a blog about moving to the US, and Tuneage, a music blog I co-founded. I curate Give Me Something to Read. I started Word Journal, and I occasionally contribute to The Small Picture.
nostrich at quisby dot net
Text reblogged from KatyDidSays
It must be really weird
to have a daughter and love her and devote your whole life to her well being and hope you’ve armed her with everything she could ever need in order to succeed and then send her off to become a contestant on The Bachelor.
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@nostrich Thanks in particular to you for the surprise phone call of the night, a delightful and gracious chat; you & Heather are awesome!
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Miami, FL — In what’s been characterized as a “stunning” upset, New Orleans Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees had his Super Bowl MVP award revoked tonight, in favor of: my razor. Brees commented, “you just can’t compete with that many blades.”
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indefensible asked: I read with interest your recent piece on the varying levels of utility of 'print view' pages on websites. What are your thoughts on the impact that using these pages might have on the economic model of the websites?
In one sense, what makes those pages so much more readable is their lack of advertising. Do we as consumers of content have a responsibility to at least subject ourselves to some advertising as a way of paying for content?
I'm torn on the issue, and and intrigued as to what you might think.
I will preface this by saying that anything I say on this matter comes purely from what I’ve picked up as an interested bystander. I have no professional insight to offer.
If you go to The Atlantic, what do you see? What you don’t see is a barrage of advertising. There are just a couple of ad spots on the entire home page. Go to an article view, still only two ad spots anywhere that matters (there’s one right at the bottom, but you don’t have to see it until you’re done reading). They’re not militant about article pagination, either. It’s one of the most pleasant reading experiences I’ve seen.
The Atlantic made 32 percent of their yearly revenue just from online advertising.
If they can do that, why can’t everyone else? It’s clear to just about anyone that bombarding readers with advertising is not the answer. (I’d like to take this opportunity to extend another “fuck you” to Salon.com.)
I’d say we do have some responsibility to subject ourselves to advertising. It is, after all, just about the only way these people make money. When you buy a newspaper, you agree to a little advertising. When you pay to get past a paywall, you usually agree to a little advertising. Just by visiting say, newsweek.com, you agree to a little advertising. But there’s a breaking point. There’s no reason whatsoever that I should have to be subjected to a full page interstitial — that has audio! — just because I went to Salon’s home page. (And while I was sitting here typing this, with Salon’s homepage in the background, I saw the homepage auto refresh itself and pop up another fucking interstitial. Fuck that.)
Obviously, this online gig is still new ground for publishers and I think they have a way to go in figuring out how to make it profitable without pissing everyone off. Just like the movie industry has to adapt for online, and just like the music industry has to adapt for online, so does the publishing industry. And the sooner they realise that making their websites a pain in the ass to visit isn’t the right way to go about it, the better.
All that said: I don’t skip the ads. I don’t use Adblock — I do use a Flash blocker, but only to blacklist certain sites — and to even get to a printer formatted article, you have to go to the regular article first, with all its ads. And that’s why I will never read anything on Salon (or link to it on the Instapaper homepage), but will happily link to an Atlantic piece, or a New Yorker piece.
That’s my uninformed take on it. Advertising is a necessary evil, and I’m happy to subject myself to it — and I think everyone else should be too. I don’t like it when people use things like Adblock to completely evade advertising, it sends the wrong message. (I daresay it might even make it worse for people that don’t.) If you don’t like the level of advertising on a certain site: either tell them, or don’t visit the site. Severed pageviews and pointed feedback sends a much stronger message than just blocking ads does.
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Increasingly, people that like to read stuff online are splitting into two camps:
- Those who will read almost anything, almost anywhere, within any environment
- Those who seek a pleasant reading experience, consistently presented, without being bombarded by ads and ridiculously paginated articles
For those of us seeking a non-sadistic reading experience, we may as well go fuck ourselves, because nobody cares about us. Websites publishing original material are only getting worse: ads, multiple pages, full-page interstitial ads, awfully designed pages, horrifically intrusive ads, and so on. Our only refuge has become the print stylesheet.
More or less a standard offering now, it provides a much more barebones reading experience with little extra cruft, very little advertising, and generally a much more readable article. They also work a lot better with tools like Instapaper and Readability.
But even the print stylesheet doesn’t offer a perfect experience every time. I’ve been curating the Editor’s Picks on Instapaper’s homepage for months now, and I’ve noticed some trends:
- A lot of people are heading to the print stylesheet. The majority of articles that come through the submission queue (populated with articles bookmarked a certain number of times) already point to the print version.
- Although a print view should offer a relatively consistent reading experience, it frequently does not.
- The way various publications format their print stylesheets actually varies surprisingly widely.
- There are still major publications that do not even offer a print view.
With that in mind, I did some Real Science on print views, and created this handy chart of how competent various publications’ print views are. (I just noticed that I forgot to do Newsweek, but I can vouch for it being excellent!)
Here’s a quick explanation of each criteria I looked at:
- Exists: Does a print view even exist?
- Third Party: Are they using some shitty third-party to generate print views? (There is only one, and it is incredibly shitty. On my first day doing Instapaper’s Editor’s Picks, Marco warned me never to post anything that used it for its print view.)
- New Page: Links not opening a new tab/page/window is generally considered good practice. A lot of publications do not follow that practice.
- Ads: Are there ads? For this, I only counted ads that obstructed the content in some way.
- Single Page: Is it a single page? Print views should be a single page, every time. Nobody I looked at violated this, but I’ve seen people that do.
- Print Dialog: Some print views use Javascript to automatically pop-up a print dialog. Super annoying and unnecessary.
- Readable: This is a purely subjective criteria. Basically: is it readable? Mostly, all it had to do was have a sensible line-height, max-width, and font size.
This is by no means a comprehensive list — and I mostly excluded blogs (including only a couple of widely-read-in-their-industry ones) — just a list of publications a lot of people read and rely on for news. I also excluded publications that are mostly subscriber content only.
Some of the results are surprising — wasn’t expecting so much green! — and some of the results are not (eat a dick, Techcrunch and Mashable).
Enjoy.
NB: Thanks for the assistance, everyone. (Sorry that you can’t actually see any of the answers. I’ll put that theme code back in some day. Maybe.)
NB 2: You’ll note that Salon’s row reads FUCKYOU. That’s because Salon’s website is fucking terrible, and I didn’t even make it to an article — never mind a print view — before getting too annoyed to continue. I opened the home page and was greeted with an interstitial that filled the entire viewport, and then loaded a video with sound that auto-played. Fuck you, Salon.
NB 3: Ok, I forgot Newsweek and Ars Technica. Newsweek’s print view is excellent. Ars Technica’s is shitty: their print view only shows the current page of the heavily-paginated article, and makes you pay for a single page.
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Help me out with something here, Tumblr folk.
What would you say the most important or widely-read web publications are? (Not necessarily web-only, but those with a considerable and important online presence; the New York Times, for example, counts.) This is for something, the fruits of which shall be revealed shortly.
My list, currently:
- New Yorker
- New York Times
- Salon
- Wired
- NY Post
- Washington Post
- Chicago Tribune
- New Scientist
I seem to have most of the news-focused ones, but I’m after the more specific/general interest ones, too. (IE, New Scientist, Wired.) What am I forgetting? (Note that I’m not necessarily after a list of new bookmarks, just a comprehensive list. Editorial quality and the like aren’t important.)
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Made Pancakes Today; They Were OK
Every morning, before even the sun has risen, he wakes up before you, he dons his cape — though on Sundays he does not don anything at all — and he heads to the kitchen. What he does in there is a mystery to everyone but himself.
He is a superhero. Nobody knows how he got his powers — some claim he was bitten by a failed military experiment as a child, some claim he was born this way, some insist he’s hiding a wife that does all the dirty work for him, and some claim he is nothing more than a British immigrant. The truth is: nobody knows for sure.
His super power?
He makes perfect pancakes.
He scoffs at the likes of Batman and Superman. Crime fighting? What-the-fuck-ever, Clark Kent, any chump can catch a crook. Can Batman bake? Fuck no he can’t. The world doesn’t need another crime fighting superhero with a troubled childhood. The world needs pancakes.
So tomorrow, the next day, and for as long as necessary, he will rise in the darkness of dawn, he will don his cape — unless it’s a sunday — and he will bake the most perfect fucking pancakes you ever saw.
You may know him as Richard. You may even know him as nostrich. He prefers the moniker…
Pancake Guy
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Tech Journalism Near Death as iPad Coverage Has Unexpected Side Effects
CUPERTINO, CA — Experts expressed grave concern for the health of technology journalism this morning, one week after hundreds of tech blogs suffered extreme, adverse reactions to a routine Apple product launch. One witness commented, “they just couldn’t handle it. I don’t think some of these guys will ever recover.” A spokesperson for Engadget said that coverage of the iPad was “critical, but stable,” following emergency procedures. Steve Jobs was not available for comment.
Photo reblogged from Oh Hey There
(via tristn)
I’m not usually one to brag (lie) but this is awesome.
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