Another mistake by you: I should have realized that "leisure read" meant "mostly uninteresting (to me) personal drivel".Originally Posted by Yarin
Well the short lived visit is a reality. But we are fine with readers who look through the content. Better to have a few good followers than too many people expecting too many not-so-important things.
Last edited by arunj; 01-01-2014 at 03:52 PM.
Anyway, I think your and my point of views are clear now and I am not going to post any further replies in this thread.
Lol this guy got pwned so hard. XD
So let me get this straight, one happy guy comes and simply introduces his blog of Technology & leisure, looking for some constructive feedback and good audience because this is a technical board but people from the start are taking pride in tearing him apart in the name of criticism.
Way to go guys!
Regards.
Are you suggesting that's a real blog with a real person behind it, and not a marketing "blog" with fake linkbait posts put together by some marketer? Why would you suggest that?
I chose to let this thread live because the blog did not immediately cry out marketing spam to me, and the thread starter joined a fairly long time ago and was active at some point in the past. Upon further inspection, arunj's past posts do not strike me as being of the "try to become legit to get away with marketing spam" variety, and I still do not find anything nefarious about the blog -- however questionable a "mixed content" approach might be to attract and sustain readership -- so if you have evidence to the contrary (particularly the linkbait you mentioned), please point it out. As it stands, I suspect that you owe arunj an apology.
Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
I very well may be using my terms incorrectly -- I mean a blog full of PR department-written posts with links inserted quasi-randomly. (I have no evidence other than there not being much of a consistent style between the reviews and the "utils".) I don't think there's anything technologically nefarious going on, just some spam. At any rate, I hereby withdraw all comments and apologize and will go eat some crow.
I just went from believing you're 22/23 years old with a bachelor's degree as you claim to believing you're a 17 year old in high school.
Anyway, I agree with PrinceCruise.
I'd agree with PrinceCruise too but judging by how the OP responds to the internet, maybe he's better off not making a blog. It's great that he has ambition, he just needs to be less sensitive about others' opinions and how to take and digest criticism in all forms. It takes a thick skin to be successful.
Also, I'm 17 now? You've clearly never played DotA. It's just like Warcraft 3 but every time you kill an opposing hero, it'll say something like, "MutantJohn pwned perfusionman's head for +255 gold!!!" So don't blame me, blame easily imitable videogames.
O_o
@arunj: Ask yourself two questions:
Is a now overloaded "whizzy" feature worth viewers missing content?
Is "throw everything at the hub" a valid model for any publication?
You should strongly consider disabling "infinite scrolling". Even the idea of "infinite scrolling" is broken as it requires JavaScript, generally needs markup specific notations, and doesn't actually enhance viewer experience even if you don't already offer proper pagination because seeking across massive pages is a pain in the butt. (So, "infinite scrolling" is unlike a fancy JavaScript "navbar", for example, in the "navbar" just offers a list menu in a traditional GUI form.) The real problem with "infinite scrolling" though is that the implementations are broken: depending on the browser, browser version, window size, and method of scrolling how "infinite scrolling" responds vastly changes viewer experience. (For example, let us assume that laserlight and I are both navigating your site with version 27 of "Firefox", with the only difference being that I have a smaller window due to having a smaller screen; my experience will actually be better with most implementations because the uncorrected view of the page will be "nearer" to my expected view.) For the most part, the viewer experience doesn't result in the expected view of the page. In the case of my experience with your page, "infinite scrolling" kicked my view down far further than it should have which means that I missed five article spoilers. Is that something you want?
You've asserted that the responses here just don't understand the various forms of categorization offered by "CMS". Well, right or wrong in that assessment, you clearly also do not understand the offerings of categorization. The "hub" offered by your site is a random collection of material of varying quality. Whether you like it or not, you'll just have to fave the reality: the "hub" offered by your site is off putting. You should realize that the "tag" offering available to "WordPress" isn't just a client facing mechanism; you can use it to your advantage as well. Consider designing your "hub" around updates (a "What's New" feed of articles published relative to the day containing spoilers of the days newly published material.) or focusing the "hub" on the intent behind the site. I'm not saying that you shouldn't provide a "list of everything" type view and feed; I'm only saying that such should not be the default viewer facing form the site takes. I'm also not saying you shouldn't have a random collection of materials being that the site is a personal one; I'm only saying that you should endeavor to focus the "hub" so that new visitors will know by glance the focus of the articles you intend to provide whether this be personal thoughts or a technology tutorial. You are upset about the opinions you've heard here, and I understand that, but do you honestly imagine the opinions are unique to this forum? As painful as it might be, you should take the criticism to heart because it will not just be Elysia who scoffs at the site. Many casual viewers will judge your site negatively, and in that instant decide not to return. Is that something you want?
Soma
“Salem Was Wrong!” -- Pedant Necromancer
“Four isn't random!” -- Gibbering Mouther
Thanks for a feedback that reasons well and makes sense.
I have disabled the infinite scroll after I realized what you have explained so well.
Regarding your last question "Many casual viewers will judge your site negatively, and in that instant decide not to return. Is that something you want?"
- We do indeed. We believe that we are better off with a few regular visitors who have spent enough time to judge the blog and then taken a decision on whether to follow it or not. That's because we know they will not leave us suddenly without trying to justify anything they dislike. And right now we have 160 of them with a visit count of 1.5 lakhs.
I wouldn't have responded further to anything but a constructive reply like this because you have taken your time to think through things and posted your opinion and suggestions very clearly.
Last edited by arunj; 01-02-2014 at 02:00 PM.
I may have come off as a little harsh, but really, you should be welcoming feedback of any kind, harsh or not.
Anyway, don't want to rant, so I'll give you a few reasons why infinite scrolling is bad.
Reason #1: You cannot remember the position. Closed the page? Too bad. Now you have to scroll back to where you were again. Clicked a link and hit the back button? Chances are you will have to scroll back to where you were again. Restarted the browser? Too bad. Likely the same thing will happen here too.
Reason #2: Memory. The page can become infinitely long. It can take up hundreds of thousands of lines of html and javascript code. That takes memory and slows down the browser. As if that wasn't bad enough, it slows down other operations such as searching or even scrolling.
Reason #3: Network latency. How well does your code handle timeouts and times when it takes a long time to fetch the contents? Chances are, if it times out, you have to refresh the page which usually will purge your scrolling history. Even if not, sometimes it's faster to just stop a page and refresh. Does your infinite scrolling allow for this? Most likely not. Refreshing the page would probably mean scrolling all the way back.
Reason #4: It uses javascript. As phantom already mentioned, infinite relies on javascript being on. Many people choose not to do this, javascript being a security risk and all, plus the fact that any javascript code can store cookies in secret to spy on you. Having a site that works without javascript is a good thing.
Reason #5: Searching. Looking for the oldest post? Looking to skip from, say, "D" to "G"? You have to keep scrolling until you reach there instead of being able to jump directly to, or guess where it might be even to reach that point faster.
Reason #6: Want to see that part of the site later? Too bad! Too bad because you can't "remember" a position if you use infinite scrolling. Browsers work with URLs. Infinite scrolling does not use URLs.
To be fair, many of these reasons can be worked around, but at what price? Why spend so much time coding it when you can just not use it in the first place? Most likely it's going to be full of bugs and half-baked anyway.
So this is constructive feedback as to why you shouldn't use infinite scrolling. Take it as you will.
