these are the ideas behind scroll kit and i'm glad you agree with them. but we'd be some pretty shitty hackers if we just talked about them and weren't trying to actually DO something to change things.
Absolutely. We seek to solve the problems we see in the world through technology.
I feel your message would be more honest if you went for an approach like WordPress did: with an open-source tool. You make money by providing a hosting platform for the less technically inclined.
And think about it. Wordpress actually did revolutionize publishing.
Nothing, but calling it a movement aimed to fix broken publishing when it's just another walled garden that will disappear at the first buyout offer is disingenuous.
To clarify a bit: I am annoyed not by what the product is, but by the way it's marketed.
I didn't even make it that far. [EDIT:Although, wanting to comment, I did go back and read the whole thing.]
"make them scroll" ... um, no. The increasing number of pages that are requiring vertical scroll to be useful loses the great usability/accessibility of the "above the fold" method of pages. Even with the improvements in scrolling over the past decade (scroll wheel mice and scrolling gestures), it's still a chore that makes the "cost" tradeoff of some sites (including, I'll admit, this one) to be "not worth the effort."
That's nice. I don't like to scroll. Surely there's someone else in the world like me.
From the article you linked:
"[P]eople used the scrollbar on 76% of the pages,
with 22% being scrolled all the way to the bottom
That's a low enough conversion rate for certain page types that it may not always be worth the effort. If I want something, I'm happy to scroll, but if I'm browsing, there had better be a good value proposition in doing so.
"Another eye-tracking study conducted by CX Partners
confirms that people do scroll if certain design
guidelines are followed"
... So, the article says (several times) people scroll, but only under certain design conditions. Is a long form article worth scrolling for? Usually; it's better than ad-ridden pagination, I think we'll both agree. Where the OP went wrong, I think, was that the scrolling was a design gimmick, not a content opportunity. It came across, to me, like the purpose of scrolling was to be
"artsy" and "design-minded", rather than to convey content. Perhaps what I'm attributing to the scrolling design was really a lack of editing for length.
Jakob Neilsen (who was mentioned in the article you linked) also comments on why scrolling might be less of a good idea [1]:
"scrolling ... can be difficult for users with motor skill impairments."
"Low-literacy users can't easily reacquire their position in the text
after it moves.
"Elderly users often have trouble getting to the right spot in scrolling
menus and other small scrolling items.
Not everything you read on the Internet is wholly true.
Web publishing isn't broken because of the experience of making a page, it's broken because someone else determines the experience of visiting a page. This gives publishers control over the visitor's experience.
You're able to build a completely unique site from a blank page in scroll kit. You are given a text form in other publishing platforms. Those are pretty different terms.
A large part of the value of the web is in creating _structured_ data. I would be amenable to a proposition that gave people more creative tools for publishing on those terms, but I think you're missing the point of the medium.
I believe, that this is the view of a lot of persons/companies, that make money of the web. And I have to disagree, because of my experience with a lot of "not so savvy"-users.
For them, they like good information (or entertainment) and they really like the personal touch to things. If the information is interesting, they like to know more about the individual behind these pages. and a lot of these people like the handcrafted touch of "older" websites, that do not look all alike (wp, svbtle, octopress, et al).
So maybe the product is interesting for some of the people, who are not skilled in designing individual pages, but want non the less to publish on the web.
Just my experience with the 99% of people, that are not hackers, professional bloggers or net-savvy-people. Me, I'm going to stay with nanoc [http://nanoc.stoneship.org/] and jekyll [https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll] and for the time being (until redesigns are finished) wordpress.
I didn't mean to imply that anyone has made the activity of creating structured data sufficiently interesting or worthwhile for "not so savvy" users, but that this project doesn't seem to advance to cause.
A lot of people and companies do make money on this, but I see the creation of rich structured data as good for everyone. We can better learn from and engage with well structured collective knowledge.
structured data is actually something i'm really into. what sort of metadata or tags do you think might be useful to add in automatically? i don't want to make the user do any more work than necessary.
FUCK.THAT.