Welcome to Black Box Blog! The purpose of this blog is to examine and critique computer interfaces. Among software developers, interfaces are sometimes known as "black boxes", because they show their external workings to users but hide their internal workings. In other words, they show what they do, but hide how they do it. Our interactions with these black boxes increasingly constitute our interaction with the modern world. This blog is dedicated to examining the ways that current popular interfaces work and don't work, and particularly to suggesting ways that they might be improved.
I am both a
writer and software developer by trade, and I intend to bring my inside-the-box knowledge to this blog, but to write it from the perspective of the user on the outside. The end goal is to help build better black boxes.
Feel free to send me your suggestions for software you'd like to see reviewed.
Posts
This comment isn't about your blog specifically, but it is about user interfaces, about blogs in general. I may here be revealing my ignorance, but why are blogs so hard to navigate? It appears that navigation to prior months entries is not built in; that blog owners have to explicitly insert links to prior months entries, and that otherwise they are inaccessible. And I have rarely seen a blog with a simple text search box for finding matching entries. Why?
ReplyDeleteWhich blogs in specific are you having this problem with? Most blogs I know provide two main ways of accessing previous entries.
ReplyDeleteThe first is the rolling-entries style of display. When you go to the blog's home page, you see the last X entries. At the bottom will be a link to the previous X entries before that; on that page will be a link to the previous X entries before that; and so on.
The second is the archive feature that I have in the right column on this blog. Obviously in this case you can't navigate to previous months because there are no posts from previous months.
Search boxes are rarer than they should be. This blog hasn't been going long enough yet to merit one. There is always a simple way around: go to Google and search site:[the blog's url] and the terms you want. There are a number of limitations with this, though, and I am planning to post about this specific problem at some point in the future.
I can't remember any particular blogs. I never have read many blogs, and in the last couple of years I've read even fewer, so I may be remembering older, less capable blog software. However, it's my clear memory that very few of the blogs I saw had your archive feature; I assumed that was something you inserted or built yourself. It's also my clear memory that only about half had the link to previous entries at the bottom of each page. On many blogs, the older material seemed to be simply inaccessible by any method.
ReplyDeleteI may have just not seen the search boxes. I missed it on your blog until just after my first post. Doh.
I guess I wasn't the best person to comment on this.
Hmm. I can't remember blogs like that, but that seems plausible. Obviously this sort of thing improves over time. Most blogging now is done through professional software where archive features are pretty standard. They could still stand to be improved, though.
ReplyDelete