Dear Blog Designers:
OK, seriously. Maybe I'm just really dense, or something. I must need to RTFM, RTFAQ, JFGI, or CUWANAITTRHMSRO 1. But seriously, when I discover a blog, and want to look at the archives, why do you insist on showing the several-year-old entries Last-In-First-Out on every page? Why is there not a "read this like a human being would" option on any blog service I've seen? I mean, some of your services make it more actively painful to read a blog from the beginning than others, but they all seem to be built around the idea that I'm looking for the most recent entry, even when I'm clicking on the link to all the entries of March in 2007.
This is not how reading works. We read top to bottom. This is not how time sense works. We need to understand what came before to understand what's happening. Why the hell do I have to read every blog archive by scrolling rapidly down to the oldest entry on a page, then slowly down to read it, then rapidly back up past what I just read (and what I'm about to read) to find the "next" entry's head, and then down again, and then up again, ad nauseum (and it does, actually, kinda make me nauseous to scroll things against the way I read them)?
Have I missed something? Can my more blog-savvy friends let me on on some industry-standard-and-never-mentioned CGI GET flag I can toss up there to show things FIFO instead of LIFO? Or is it just that in all the years of blogging, the idea of cohesive narrative never mattered to anyone but me?
1 - Come Up With A New Acronym Indicating That The Reader Has Missed Something Really Obvious
This is not how reading works. We read top to bottom. This is not how time sense works. We need to understand what came before to understand what's happening. Why the hell do I have to read every blog archive by scrolling rapidly down to the oldest entry on a page, then slowly down to read it, then rapidly back up past what I just read (and what I'm about to read) to find the "next" entry's head, and then down again, and then up again, ad nauseum (and it does, actually, kinda make me nauseous to scroll things against the way I read them)?
Have I missed something? Can my more blog-savvy friends let me on on some industry-standard-and-never-mentioned CGI GET flag I can toss up there to show things FIFO instead of LIFO? Or is it just that in all the years of blogging, the idea of cohesive narrative never mattered to anyone but me?
1 - Come Up With A New Acronym Indicating That The Reader Has Missed Something Really Obvious