entropia

A while ago I wrote about some of the issues I have with modern blogs.

Tag clouds are the worst thing to happen to blogs since the term “blog”. If you want to show the most popular tags, show a list; they’re smaller, easier to understand, and more informative.
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[Calendar views] are nothing but more complex and less usable reworkings of more established views.

Unfortunately, my borderline-incoherent rambling would go unheard (although in a wierd coincidence, CodeBetter, which I used as an example, redesigned their site soon after I posted). But thankfully Jeff Atwood now has a nice post with a similar subject: Thirteen Blog Clichés.

I can’t think of a single time I have ever found the blog calendar widget helpful. My computer already has a calendar function, so it’s not like I need another calendar displayed in my web browser. Every post carries an obvious datestamp, so I can easily discern when it was published. But knowing whether someone posted an entry on the third tuesday of the month? Utterly useless.
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The perception is that tag cloud visualizations are cool, like badges of honor for the tagging club. The reality is that tag cloud visualizations are chaotic, noisy, and unusable. Keep the tagging, lose the cloud. A simple sorted list of tags, along with the number of posts associated with each tag, is much more effective.