2010-12-27
post/2474894162
Ben Ward in a post entitled (ha) Non-Titular.
At some point, if I can excise enough venom for it to be publishable in polite company, I might write about Instagram. One of the things I need to note is precisely its lack of all sorts of metadata. Not only does it turn the title into an optional field that’s more akin to a comment by the poster, but it doesn’t have tags, doesn’t distinguish date taken and date uploaded¹, didn’t have proper geotagging at first (and now, like Twitter, although it does, it’s only binary on/off and not post-editable).
Of course, this all contributes to the much-vaunted ease of uploading and general lack of friction², but to me it feels regressive, stupid; a return to the barbarity of a box of prints from 35mm with no labels, no information about the camera; no context.
Perhaps that’s what the kids want these days, though.
¹ They’re not necessarily the same, since Instagram allows you to browse through your camera roll. Of course, they’re treating that as an edge case, and for their service, it probably is.
² See also: “Friction is what keeps people from signing up for your site or downloading your app. Because it’s too expensive, because it’s too embarrassing, because it’s too difficult, because it’s difficult at all.”
2010-03-10
Future-O-Matic Theory Maker
With apologies to Russell:
… on second thoughts, maybe it works better on a whiteboard. Ah well.
2008-10-23
Fix Yr Tumblr Template Titles
I’m a big fan of meaningful titles. Not only do they make your web browser’s history easier to navigate, but they also give bookmarks - both local and shared - meaningful, and they’re good for IRC and IM conversations too. I’m told they’re important for SEO, but I’m not exactly bothered about that one.
When I first published my custom theme for notes.husk.org, the title was fairly useful:
<title>notes.husk.org.
{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary}{/block:PostSummary}</title>
This gives the index page a title of notes.husk.org (yes, I should be using {Title}, but I don’t care to make this theme public- yet), and if it’s a single post (for example, my previous text post), it also puts the post’s name into the title, so you end up with “notes.husk.org. Irony in Stamps”.
I decided to add a full stop after the PostSummary, but then considered some other cases. For example, what about archive by date pages, like this one? Well, there’s a set of tags for use when you’re on such pages for pagination, and you can (ab)use them like so:
{block:DayPagination} noted on {block:Posts}
{block:NewDayDate}{Year}-{MonthNumberWithZero}-{DayOfMonthWithZero}.
{/block:NewDayDate}{/block:Posts}{/block:DayPagination}
It’s not terribly clean, because you need to loop over the posts to get the day out, but it is there. However, that still leaves the other sort of pagination, the straightforward 10-per-page sort. That’s easy enough to deal with, though:
{block:PreviousPage} archive page {CurrentPage}
of {TotalPages}.{/block:PreviousPage}
Here, PreviousPage is only invoked if you’re not on the newest (ie front) page, so the title there is kept short. Thankfully this is more straightforward than the date archive version, but I might end up tweaking the wording a bit (especially as Tumblr has its own concept of “archives”, which are very pretty but not templatable).
Finally, there’s tag pages, which I don’t expose (edit: now I do, on single-post pages only) but you can still get to anyway. These are pretty straightforward:
{block:TagPage}tagged {Tag}.{/block:TagPage}
So that’s it. All the pages on notes.husk.org now have a unique title, even the ones that don’t have exposed navigation. Nifty, huh? The full block, in case you want to work with it, is as follows. Have fun!
<title>notes.husk.org.
{block:PostSummary}{PostSummary}.{/block:PostSummary}
{block:DayPagination} noted on {block:Posts}
{block:NewDayDate}{Year}-{MonthNumberWithZero}-{DayOfMonthWithZero}.
{/block:NewDayDate}{/block:Posts}
{/block:DayPagination}
{block:PreviousPage} archive page {CurrentPage} of {TotalPages}.
{/block:PreviousPage}
{block:TagPage}tagged {Tag}.{/block:TagPage}</title>
