Wolf’s Little Store

As you can see, Wolf’s Little Store received an overhaul. Here’s some thoughts on the design and content decisions along the way.

No comments

Perhaps the biggest decision I took in revising the design of this blog is getting rid of the comments. I could cite a lot of reasons, including poor quality of some of the comments, not wanting to wade through a pile of spam comments to pick out the ‘valid’ ones but the most important one is a personal feeling: comments are just an entirely wrong way to communicate.

Just like you can’t hold a half-way decent debate over Twitter, a real conversation in the comments of a blog is just not possible. Imagine a conference speaker that causes an uproar by saying something controversial towards the end of his presentation. Now imagine all the people in the room voicing their opinions in one loud babble. In the end, no one actually said anything. That’s what comments feel like.

Comments are like design critique. Gut feelings. Good comments are hard because you have to see the whole picture, not pinpoint one or two points and hack away at them.

Comments invite you to quickly write down your thoughts and then move on. They are no real conversation because there is no end, and no assurance that whoever you are directing yourself to is actually going to answer to what you are saying.

Comments are far too easy. When I put time and effort into my writings, I expect others to do so too. See the contact page if you wish to reply to a post or just contact me in general.

That being said, let’s talk about the design decisions.

Readability

Reading 12px text on a computer screen is tiring. Some websites even go as far as setting 11px for their body text. Coupled with great line-height and specific fonts this can lead to proper typography (see A list apart), however I find myself having to bump up the text one notch to ensure proper readability on these sites. The page zoom in Firefox 3 is awesome for reading on the web, thank you Firefox team.

I’m all for good defaults so for this blog the default font size is 14px. Coupled with the one column layout this should relieve your eyes a bit.

Fixed positioning use

I used fixed positioning a lot, namely for the bottom navigational bar and for the arrows to go to the previous and next post. Fixed positioning for these elements works because once you know where they are, it’s really easy to navigate through the site. Articles brings you to the list, and once you’re reading a post just hit the arrows to go back and forth in time. Alternatively you can click category names pull up a list of posts within a specific category.

Simple overview of posts

I decided to go with a simple overview showing every post instead of reworking the confusing way Wordpress pagination works. As an added benefit all posts are on one and one page only - which clears the confusion if someone refers to something I wrote but links to http://v1.wolfslittlestore.be instead of the post itself. Another advantage is that when people save your links to a bookmarking webapp like del.icio.us there won’t be multiple entries (e.g. /category/post and /post and /time/post).

One category per post

I’ve always found it hard to fit writings into categories, but by clearing out the existing ones (which I sort of abused as tags) and evaluating what I actually wrote about it became pretty clear. I decided on the following categories:

Using the default link colors with a small twist

Too many websites do all sorts of stuff with anchors, to the point where I don’t really know what’s clickable and what’s not. Subtraction is an example of a site that looks great but lacks clearly identifiable links. I went for the default link colors for :link and :visited, but instead of using text-decoration: underline; I removed the underline in favour of a subtle border.

Do websites have to look the same in every browser?

No. Hope you like it.

• Category: my work
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