Journal tags: icon

In person events are like buses. You go two years without one and then three come along at once.

My buffer is overflowing from experiencing three back-to-back events. Best of all, my participation was different each time.

First of all, there was Leading Design New York, where I was the host. The event was superb, although it’s a bit of a shame I didn’t have any time to properly experience Manhattan. I wasn’t able to do any touristy things or meet up with my friends who live in the city. Still the trip was well worth it.

Right after I got back from New York, I took the train to Edinburgh for the Design It Build It conference where I was a speaker. It was a good event. I particularly enjoyed Rafaela Ferro talk on accessibility. The last time I spoke at DIBI was 2011(!) so it was great to make a return visit. I liked that the audience was seated cabaret style. That felt safer than classroom-style seating, allowing more space between people. At the same time, it felt more social, encouraging more interaction between attendees. I met some really interesting people.

I got from Edinburgh just in time for UX Camp Brighton on the weekend, where I was an attendee. I felt like a bit of a moocher not giving a presentation, but I really, really enjoyed every session I attended. It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a Barcamp-style event—probably the last Indie Web Camp I attended, whenever that was. I’d forgotten how well the format works.

But even with all these in-person events, online events aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Yesterday I started hosting the online portion of Leading Design New York and I’ll be doing it again today. The post-talk discussions with Julia and Lisa are lots of fun!

So in the space of just of a couple of weeks I’ve been a host, a speaker, and an attendee. Now it’s time for me to get my head back into one other event role: conference curator. No more buses/events are on the way for the next while, so I’m going to be fully devoted to organising the line-up for UX London 2022. Exciting!

I don’t know about you, but it seems like everyone I follow on Twitter is playing Wordle. Although I don’t play the game myself, I think it’s pretty great.

Not only does Wordle have a very sweet backstory, but it’s also unashamedly on the web. If you want to play, you go to the URL powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle. That’s it. No need to download an app.

That hasn’t stopped some nefarious developers trying to trick people into downloading their clones of Wordle from app stores. App stores, which are meant to be curated and safe, are in fact filled with dodgy knock-offs and scams. Contrary to popular belief, the web is quite literally a safer bet.

Wordle has a web app manifest, which means you can add it to your home screen and it will behave just like a native app (although I don’t believe it has offline support). That’s great, but the process of adding a web app to your home screen on iOS is ludicrously long-winded.

Macworld published an article detailing how to get the real Wordle app on your iPhone or iPad. On the one hand it’s great to see this knowledge being spread. On the other hand it’s dispiriting that it’s even necessary to tell people that they can do this, like it’s a hidden nerdy secret just for power users.

At this point I’ve pretty much given up on Apple ever doing anything about this pathetic situation. So what can I do instead?

Well, taking my cue from that Macworld article, the least I can do is inform people how they can add a progressive web app to their home screen.

That’s what I’ve done on thesession.org. I’ve published a page on how to install The Session to your home screen.

On both Android and iPhone the journey to installing a progressive web app begins with incomprehensible iconography. On Android you must first tap on the unlabeled kebab icon—three vertical dots. On iOS you must first tap on the unlabeled share icon—a square with an arrow coming out of it.

When it comes to mobile operating systems, consumer choice means you choose which kind of mystery meat to eat.

I’ve included screenshots to help people identify these mysterious portals. For iOS I’ve also included a video to illustrate the quest to find the secret menu item buried beneath the share icon.

I’ve linked to the page with the installation instructions from the site’s “help” page and the home page.

Handy tip: when you’re adding a start_url value to your web app manifest, it’s common to include a query string like this:

start_url: "/?homescreen"

I’m guessing most people to that so they can get analytics on how many people are starting from an icon tap. I don’t do analytics on The Session but I’m still using that query string in my start_url. On the home page of the site, I check for the existence of the query string. If it exists, I don’t show the link to the installation page. So once someone has installed the site to their home screen, they shouldn’t see that message when they launch The Session.

If you’ve got a progressive web app, it might be worth making a page with installation instructions rather than relying on browsers to proactively inform your site’s visitors. You’d still need to figure out the right time and place to point people to that page, but at least the design challenge would be in your hands.

Should you decide to take a leaf out of the Android and iOS playbooks and use mystery meat navigation to link to such a page, there’s an emoji you could potentially use: 📲

It’s still worse than using actual words, but it might be better than some random combination of dots, squares and arrows.

(I’m not really serious about using that emoji, but if you do, be sure to use a sensible aria-label value on the enclosing a element.)

Last month I wrote about writing on web.dev. At that time, the first five parts of a fourteen-part course on responsive design had been published. I’m pleased to say that the next five parts are now available. They are:

1. Typography
2. Responsive images
3. The picture element
4. Icons
5. Theming

It wasn’t planned, but these five modules feel like they belong together. The first five modules were concerned with layout tools—media queries, flexbox, grid, and even container queries. The latest five modules are about the individual elements of design—type, colour, and images. But those elements are examined through the lens of responsiveness; responsive typography with clamp, responsive colour with prefers-color-scheme, and responsive images with picture and srcset.

The final five modules should be available later this month. In the mean time, I hope you like the first ten modules.

When I was testing the dConstruct Audio Archive—which is now a Progressive Web App—I noticed some interesting changes in how Chrome on Android offers the “add to home screen” prompt.

It used to literally say “add to home screen.”

Now it simply says “add.”

I vaguely remember there being some talk of changing the labelling, but I could’ve sworn it was going to change to “install”. I’ve got to be honest, just having the word “add” doesn’t seem to provide much context. Based on the quick’n’dirty usability testing I did with some co-workers, it just made things confusing. “Add what?” “What am I adding?”

Additionally, the prompt appeared immediately on the first visit to the site. I thought there was supposed to be an added “engagement” metric in order for the prompt to appear; that the user needs to visit the site more than once.

You’d think I’d be happy that users will be presented with the home-screen prompt immediately, but based on the behaviour I saw, I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Here’s what I observed:

1. The user types the URL archive.dconstruct.org into the address bar.
2. The site loads.
3. The home-screen prompt slides up from the bottom of the screen.
4. The user immediately moves to dismiss the prompt (cue me interjecting “Don’t close that!”).

This behaviour is entirely unsurprising for three reasons:

1. We web designers and web developers have trained users to dismiss overlays and pop-ups if they actually want to get to the content. Nobody’s going to bother to actually read the prompt if there’s a 99% chance it’s going to say “Sign up to our newsletter!” or “Take our survey!”.
2. The prompt appears below the “line of death” so there’s no way to tell it’s a browser or OS-level dialogue rather than a JavaScript-driven pop-up from the site.
3. Because the prompt now appears on the first visit, no trust has been established between the user and the site. If the prompt only appeared on later visits (or later navigations during the first visit) perhaps it would stand a greater chance of survival.

It’s still possible to add a Progressive Web App to the home screen, but the option to do that is hidden behind the mysterious three-dots-vertically-stacked icon (I propose we call this the shish kebab icon to distinguish it from the equally impenetrable hamburger icon).

I was chatting with Andreas from Mozilla at the View Source conference last week, and he was filling me in on how Firefox on Android does the add-to-homescreen flow. Instead of a one-time prompt, they’ve added a persistent icon above the “line of death” (the icon is a combination of a house and a plus symbol).

When a Firefox 58 user arrives on a website that is served over HTTPS and has a valid manifest, a subtle badge will appear in the address bar: when tapped, an “Add to Home screen” confirmation dialog will slide in, through which the web app can be added to the Android home screen.

This kind of badging also has issues (without the explicit text “add to home screen”, the user doesn’t know what the icon does), but I think a more persistently visible option like this works better than the a one-time prompt.

Firefox is following the lead of the badging approach pioneered by the Samsung Internet browser. It provides a plus symbol that, when pressed, reveals the options to add to home screen or simply bookmark.

I don’t think Chrome for Android has any plans for this kind of badging, but they are working on letting the site authors provide their own prompts. I’m not sure this is such a good idea, given our history of abusing pop-ups and overlays.

Sadly, I feel that any solution that relies on an unrequested overlay is doomed. That’s on us. The way we’ve turned browsing the web—especially on mobile—into a frustrating chore of dismissing unwanted overlays is a classic tragedy of the commons. We blew it. Users don’t trust unrequested overlays, and I can’t blame them.

For what it’s worth, my opinion is that ambient badging is a better user experience than one-time prompts. That opinion is informed by a meagre amount of testing though. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s been doing more detailed usability testing of both approaches. I assume that Google, Mozilla, and Samsung are doing this kind of testing, and it would be really great to see the data from that (hint, hint).

But it might well be that ambient badging is just too subtle to even be noticed by the user.

On one end of the scale you’ve got the intrusiveness of an add-to-home-screen prompt, but on the other end of the scale you’ve got the discoverability problem of a subtle badge icon. I wonder if there might be a compromise solution—maybe a badge icon that pulses or glows on the first or second visit?

Of course that would also need to be thoroughly tested.

Andy’s been playing Devil’s Advocate again, defending the much-maligned hamburger button. Weirdly though, I think I’ve seen more blog posts, tweets, and presentations defending this supposed underdog than I’ve seen knocking it.

Take this presentation from Smashing Conference. It begins with a stirring call to arms. Designers of the web—cast off your old ways, dismiss your clichés, try new things, and discard lazy solutions! “Yes!”, I thought to myself, “this is a fantastic message.” But then the second half of the talk switches into a defence of the laziest, most clichéd, least thought-through old tropes of interface designs: carousels, parallax scrolling and inevitably, the hamburger icon.

But let’s not get into a binary argument of “good” vs. “bad” when it comes to using the hamburger icon. I think the question is more subtle than that. There are three issues that need to be addressed if we’re going to evaluate the effectiveness of using the hamburger icon:

1. representation,
2. usage, and
3. clarity.

Representation

An icon is a gateway to either some content or a specific action. The icon should provide a clear representation of the content or action that it leads to. Sometimes “clear” doesn’t have to literally mean that it’s representative: we use icons all the time that don’t actually represent the associated content or action (a 3.5 inch diskette for “save”, a house for the home page of a website, etc.). Cultural factors play a large part here. Unless the icon is a very literal pictorial representation, it’s unlikely that any icon can be considered truly universal.

If a hamburger icon is used as the gateway to a list of items, then it’s fairly representative. It’s a bit more abstract than an actual list of menu items stacked one on top of the other, but if you squint just right, you can see how “three stacked horizontal lines” could represent “a number of stacked menu items.”

If, on the other hand, a hamburger icon is used as the gateway to, say, a grid of options, then it isn’t representative at all. A miniaturised grid—looking like a window—would be a more representative option.

So in trying to answer the question “Does the hamburger icon succeed at being representative?”, the answer—as ever—is “it depends.” If it’s used as a scaled-down version of the thing its representing, it works. If it’s used as a catch-all icon to represent “a bunch of stuff” (as is all too common these days), then it works less well.

Which brings us to…

Usage

Much of the criticism of the hamburger icon isn’t actually about the icon itself, it’s about how it’s used. Too many designers are using it as an opportunity to de-clutter their interface by putting everything behind the icon. This succeeds in de-cluttering the interface in the same way that a child putting all their messy crap in the cupboard succeeds in cleaning their room.

It’s a tricky situation though. On small screens especially, there just isn’t room to display all possible actions. But the solution is not to display none instead. The solution is to prioritise. Which actions need to be visible? Which actions can afford to be squirrelled away behind an icon? A designer is supposed to answer those questions (using research, testing, good taste, experience, or whatever other tools are at their disposal).

All too often, the hamburger icon is used as an excuse to shirk that work. It’s treated as a “get out of jail free” card for designing small-screen interfaces.

To be clear: this usage—or misusage—has nothing to do with the actual icon itself. The fact that the icon is three stacked lines is fairly irrelevant on this point. The reason why the three stacked lines are so often used is that there’s a belief that this icon will be commonly understood.

That brings us to last and most important point:

Clarity

By far the most important factor in whether an icon—any icon—will be understood is whether or not it is labelled. A hamburger icon labelled with a word like “menu” or “more” or “options” is going to be far more effective than an unlabelled icon.

@andybudd Adding the word “menu” next to it goes a long way, and would help with teaching aspect to help it become more familiar in time.

— Paul Annett (@PaulAnnett) January 16, 2016

Don’t believe me? Good! Do some testing.

In my experience, 80-90% of the benefit of usability testing is in the area of labelling. And one of the lowest hanging fruit is the realisation that “Oh yeah, we should probably label that icon that we assumed would be universally understood.”

Andy mentions the “play” and “pause” symbols as an example of icons that are so well understood that they can stand by themselves. That’s not necessarily true.

@andybudd FWIW, I know some people in their 60s who couldn’t tell you what the two line pause icon would do on a web video player.

— Paul Annett (@PaulAnnett) January 16, 2016

I think there are two good rules of thumb when it comes to using icons:

1. If in doubt, label it.
2. If not in doubt, you probably should be—test your assumptions.

Results

Now that we’ve established the three criteria for evaluating an icon’s effectiveness, let’s see how the hamburger icon stacks up (if you’ll pardon the pun):

1. Representation: It depends. Is it representing a stacked list of menu items? If so, good. If not, reconsider.
2. Usage: it depends. Is it being used as an excuse to throw literally all your navigation behind it? If so, reconsider. Prioritise. Decide what needs to be visible, and what can be tucked away.
3. Clarity: it depends. Is the icon labelled? If so, good. If not, less good.

So there you go. The answer to the question “Is the hamburger icon good or bad?” is a resounding and clear “It depends.”

While doing some browser testing this week, Mark come across a particularly wicked front-end problem. Something was triggering compatibility mode in Internet Explorer 8 and he couldn’t figure out what it was.

Compatibility mode was something introduced in IE8 to try not to “break the web”, as Microsoft kept putting it. Effectively it makes IE8 behave like IE7. Why would you ever want to do that? Well, if you make websites exactly the wrong way and code for a specific browser (like, say, IE7), then better, improved browsers are something to be feared and battled against. For the rest of us, better, improved browsers are something to be welcomed.

Shockingly, Microsoft originally planned to have compatibility mode enabled by default in Internet Explorer 8. It was bad enough that they were going to ship a browser with a built-in thermal exhaust port, they also contemplated bundling a proton torpedo with it too. Needless to say, right-minded people were upset at that possibility. I wrote about my concerns back in 2008.

Microsoft changed their mind about the default behaviour, but they still shipped IE8 with the compatibility mode “feature”, which Mark was very much experiencing as a bug. Something in the CSS was triggering compatibility mode, but frustratingly, there was no easy way of figuring out what was doing it. So he began removing chunks of CSS, reducing until he could focus in on the exact piece of CSS that was triggering IE8’s errant behaviour.

Finally, he found it. He was using an icon font. Now, that in itself isn’t enough to give IE8 its conniptions—an icon font is just a web font like any other. The only difference is that this font was using the private use area of the unicode range. That’s the default setting if you’re creating an icon font using the excellent icomoon service. There’s a good reason for that:

Using Latin letters is not recommended for icon fonts. Using the Private Use Area of Unicode is the best option for icon fonts. By using PUA characters, your icon font will be compatible with screen readers. But if you use Latin characters, the screen reader might read single, meaningless letters, which would be confusing.

Well, it turns out that using assigning glyphs to this private use area was causing IE8 to flip into compatibility mode. Once Mark assigned the glyphs to different characters, IE8 started behaving itself.

Now, we haven’t tested to see if this is triggered by all of the 6400 available slots in the UTF-8 private use range. If someone wants to run that test (presumably using some kind of automation), ’twould be much appreciated.

Meantime, just be careful if you’re using the private use area for your icon fonts—you may just inadvertently wake the slumbering beast of compatibility mode.

There’s been some fantastic collaborative work done recently on the tricky issue of responsive images. Witness the community group and its attendant website, complete with logo.

Meanwhile, there’s been some great research into dealing with high-DPI displays (which the world and its dog have decided to label “retina”). There’s the in-depth analysis by Daan Jobsis which looks at what you can get away with when it comes to compression and quality for “retina” displays: quite a lot, as it turns out.

In fact, you may well be able to double the dimensions of an image while simultaneously bringing down its quality and end up with an image that is smaller in file size than the original, while still looking great on high-DP..— displays. The guys over at Filament group have labelled this Compressive Images. Nice.

I like that approach. No JavaScript polyfills. No lobbying of standards bodies.

I’m generally fan of solutions that look for ways of avoiding the problem in the first place. Hence my approach to image optimisation for all devices, widescreen or narrow.

Of course this whole issue of responsive (or compressive) images should really only apply to photographic imagery. If you’re dealing with “text as images” …don’t. Use web fonts. If you’re dealing with logos or icons, there are other options, like SVG.

Then there’s the combination of web fonts and iconography. Why not use a small web font containing just the icons you need?

I tried this recently, diligently following Josh’s excellent blog post detailing how to get icon shapes out of Fireworks, into a font editor, and then into an actual font. It works a treat, although I concur with Josh’s suggestion that the technique should really only be implemented using the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements in combination with base-64 encoding the font file. That means it won’t work in every single browser, but that’s the point: these icons should be an enhancement, not a requirement.

Having gone through the tortuous steps required to get my Mac all set up with the software required to follow Josh’s tutorial, I then spotted the note at the end of his article that pointed to Icomoon. That turns out to be a fantastic service. You can pick and choose from the icons provided or you can upload your own vector shapes. Then you can assign the unicode slots you want to use for the icons and you can get the resulting font file base-64 encoded. Very, very cool!

There’s a whole slew of icon-font services like that out there now: Pictos, Web Symbols, and Symbolset with its ingenious use of ligatures to allow for an accessible fallback.

Jenn is currently casting a critical eye over each of these service over on the Nerdary: part one, part two, and part three are all deserving of your time and attention.

Daniel recently asked a question on Twitter:

I vaguely recall someone (@lukew?) posting examples of ‘open nav’ icons (eg Path and Facebook) showing an emerging de facto standard. Link?

— Daniel Burka (@dburka) August 9, 2012

It was this article by Malarkey that he was looking for. Andy did a great job of comparing the iconography used for navigation in mobile apps and responsive sites. His conclusion:

Unless our navigation’s arranged in a grid (and so we should use a grid icon), I’m putting my weight behind three lines because I think it’s most recognisable as navigation to the average person.

The three-lines icon is certainly very popular, as can be seen in this collection of mobile navigation icons I gathered together on Dribbble.

But Tom has some reservations:

@dburka @adactio @malarkey I’m a bit suspicious of the three lines thing when not in a clear button though. Looks like a drag affordance

— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) August 9, 2012

Andy Davies points out another potential issue:

@sunpig @adactio Chrome canary is now using the triple line for the menu toolbar button twitter.com/andydavies/sta…

— Andy Davies (@andydavies) August 9, 2012

I noticed this in the more recent versions of Android too. It does indeed look a little odd to see the same icon used in the browser chrome and in the document within the browser.

But I still think it’s a good shorthand for revealing a list of items.

The unicode character ☰ ☰ (U+2630) is the Chinese trigram for sky (or heaven)—one of the eight bagua. It consists of three horizontal lines. Now that could be a handy resolution-independent way of representing navigation.

Alas, when I tested this on a range of mobile devices, some of them just showed the square box of unicode disappointment. I had much better luck with the unicode symbol for black down-pointing triangle ▼ ▼ (U+25BC).

Mind you, with a combination of @font-face and sub-setting we’re not limited to what the browser ships with—we can provide our own icons in a font file, like what Pictos is doing.

I spoke at the DIBI conference back in June. It was a really good event, despite its annoying two-track format.

My talk was entitled One Web:

The range of devices accessing the web is increasing. We are faced with a choice in how we deal with this diversity. We can either fracture the web by designing a multitude of device-specific silos, or we can embrace the flexibility of the web and create experiences that can adapt to any device or browser.

The video has been online for a while now and I finally got ‘round to getting it transcribed. You can pop on over to the articles section and read One Web. I should really re-name that section of my site: “articles” isn’t the most accurate label for a lot of the stuff there.

If you prefer listening to reading, the audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure.

I also put the slides on Speakerdeck so you play along with the presentation.

I reprised this talk in Italy recently at the From The Front gathering. The audio from that is also online if you want to compare and contrast.

June was a busy month.

• I went to Newcastle for the DIBI conference, which was quite excellent. I was very pleased with the talk I gave—called “One Web”. I think the talks were recorded on video so I hope they’ll be showing up on a video-sharing site before too long.
• I spoke on the Using Blue podcast about all sorts of design- and development-related topics.
• I went to An Event Apart Atlanta which was, as always, excellent. As usual, it was the people that really made the event so special.
• I made it back to Brighton just in time for Ampersand, which was genuinely wonderful …just ask anyone who was there.
• There was an excellent Skillswap featuring Ben Terrett and Ben Bashford that finished up with a lively discussion moderated by yours truly. You had to be there for the discussion, but you can listen to the two talks.
• Then I hopped back across the Atlantic for Indie Web Camp in Portland, which was inspiring and invigorating.

July is looking a lot calmer. I’m going to be in Brighton for the whole month. I will, however, be using the time to prepare for the onslaught of events in the coming months. In September alone, Brighton will play host to a whole slew of events falling under the banner of the Brighton Digital Festival:

• dConstruct,
• Maker Faire,
• Update,
• BarCamp and
• Flash On The Beach.

I’m going to be spending my non-travelling time this month preparing a workshop to precede dConstruct. Keep an eye on the site for more details very soon.

Oh, and remember: tickets for dConstruct go on sale this Tuesday, July 5th.

Usually when I go to a conference it involves crossing a body of water to arrive on foreign shores, often in Europe or America. But the last two events I attended were much closer to home.

Two weeks ago there was Web Directions @media in London. Thank you to everyone who provided questions for the Hot Topics Panel. It went swimmingly, thanks to the eloquence and knowledge of the panelists: Brian, Relly, Bruce and Douglas Fucking Crockford. There was a surprising lack of contentiousness on the panel but I made up for it by arguing with the audience instead. Once the audio is available I’ll be sure to get it transcribed like I did last year.

I just got back from another conference that didn’t involve crossing any international boundaries: DIBI in Newcastle.

It was an excellent event …with just one exception. It bills itself as “the two-track web conference” and that’s the problem. As with Web Directions, I found myself torn between the “design” and “development” talks (a fairly arbitrary distinction for me). The first thing I had to do was choose between Yaili in one room and Jake in another. An impossible choice! I went for Jake in the end and he was absolutely bloody brilliant (as usual) but I’m sure Yaili’s talk was also excellent …and I missed it.

Apart from that heavy dose of FOMO it really was superb. The venue was gorgeous, the quality of the talks was really, really high, the attendees were super friendly and the organisers did a fantastic job of looking after everyone and making sure everything ran like clockwork. I doff my hat to Gavin and his gang.

I was nervous about my talk. It was material I hadn’t presented before. But once I got on stage I just reverted to ranting, which people seemed to enjoy. I had fun anyway. Again, once the audio or video is available I’ll be sure to get it transcribed.

It was also my first time in Newcastle …or Gateshead, whichever. It was certainly showing its best side. It really is quite a lovely place.

My next destination is bit further afield. I’m off to Atlanta for An Event Apart which kicks off on Monday. If you’re going too, be sure to say hello.

The RSS vine is humming with point and counterpoint this week.

Adobe revealed their new range of icons, based on mashing up a colour wheel with the periodic table of the elements. Lots of people don’t like ‘em: Stan doesn’t; Dave doesn’t. Some people do like ‘em: Veerle does. I can’t say I’m all that keen on them but I honestly can’t muster up much strength of conviction either way.

Let us leave the designers for a moment and cast our gaze upon the hot topic amongst the techy crowd…

Dave Winer looked at JSON and didn’t like what he saw:

Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.

James Bennet wrote an excellent response:

Of course, this ignores the fact that the Lisp folks have been making the same argument for years, wondering why there was this great pressing need to go out and invent XML when s-expressions were just dandy.

The debate continues over on Scripting.com, where the best comment comes from Douglas Crockford:

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

The discussion continues. Be it icons or data formats, the discourse remains remarkably civil. Perhaps it’s the seasonal spirit of goodwill. Whatever happened to the good ol’ “Mac vs. Windows”-style flame wars?

In contrast, Roger has posted a refreshingly curmudgeonesque list entitled Six things that suck about the Web in 2006. He had me nodding my head in vigourous agreement with point number six:

Over-wide, fixed width layouts. Go wide if you must. Use a fixed width if you don’t know how to make a flexible layout. But don’t do both. Horizontal scrolling, no thanks.

Perhaps I should post my own list of things about the Web that suck, but I fear it would be a never-ending roster. Instead I’ll restrict myself to one single thing, specifically related to blogs:

Ads on blogs. They suck. I find them disrespectful; like going into somebody’s house for a nice cup of tea only to have them try to flog you a nice set of encyclopedias.

Just to be clear: ads on commercial sites (magazines, resources, whatever) I understand. But on a personal site, they bring down the tone far more than any use of typography, colour or layout could ever offset.

I used to wonder why people put those “Digg this” or “Delicious this” links on their blog posts. I couldn’t see the point. But combined with google ads, I guess they make sense. They’re a way of driving traffic, eyeballs, click-through and by extension, filthy lucre. That’s fine… as long as you don’t mind being a whore.

Remember the term “Cam whore?”:

A Cam whore is a term for people who expose themselves on the Internet with webcam software in exchange for goods, usually via enticing viewers to purchase items on their wishlists or add to their online accounts.

I think it’s high time we coined the term “Blog whore” to describe people who slap google ads all over a medium intended for personal expression.

Alas, most of my friends, colleagues and co-workers are Blog whores. Scrivs manages to be Blog whore, Digg whore and pimp all at the same time with his 9 Rules bitches. In his recent round-up of blog designs, he says of Shaun’s site:

In a perfect world there are no ads, but we don’t live in that kind of world yet for the time being we can escape to the land of make believe when visiting Inman’s site.

Well, I see no reason why we can’t all live in that perfect world. In the style of Robert’s ludicrously provocative hyperbole, I hereby declare that a blog with ads isn’t really a blog. So there.

Ah, that’s better. There’s nothing like a good rant to counteract all that civilised discourse.

Happy holidays, Blog whores!