canned dragons
Web Simplicity
A couple of posts from independent bloggers have struck a chord with me in the last few days. I’ve spent some time over the holiday break moving my site back to Blot (my favorite blogging service) after support returned. After doing some redesign work, I hit a point where I started to question the value of diminishing returns with respect to over engineering the UI. Khaled Abou Alfa, who is a much better site designer than I will ever be, has some words of wisdom on the subject.
Over the last 20 years of playing around with websites I have wondered to myself why I bother spending time tweaking and fixing and sweating the pixel details. I’m not alone in this space as clearly many, many others have the same tinkering itch. It’s an itch that you can’t help but scratching away at. Leave it alone and it will be fine.
Of course, you have to get to that point where you feel a reasonable sense of comfort with how your blog looks and functions.1
I have experienced some struggles with the open graph cards since moving my blog again. Honestly, I’m not sure why things would have changed in this area. I haven’t put a lot of effort into working out the kinks, yet. After reading this post from Manuel Moreale, I’m less inclined to get hung up on part of the equation.
This blog is designed to do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to integrating with the social web. If you look at the source you’ll see that I have almost no meta tags. I have a title and a meta description and that’s about it. I also blocked all incoming Mastodon requests to my server because their implementation of link previews is so stupid that deserves to be blocked. And there’s nothing to be fetched here anyway since my posts don’t have a social media sharing image or other meta information.
It’s hard not to agree with the sentiment regarding the Mastodon link previews, though I’m syndicating and posting less on that platform, anyway. In general, though, it feels appropriate to let some emphasis on the social sharing aspects of blog posts go. I’ll probably never be as decisive about it as Moreale, but I also don’t want to spend a ton of time focusing on what should be a secondary concern.
I find one of the trickiest parts of blog design to be assessing the capability of handling both short (or even micro) posts as well as long posts.↩︎
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