Blerg!

I guess it's once again time to rant about something I hate, and hate increasingly, about the internet. That is this ever expanding practice of bloggers forcing their readers to click to a separate page to read a post. I hate it, everyone I know hates it, and yet farther down the rabbit hole we go. Here are the two Engadget posts which set me off yesterday, posted within less than 3 hours of each other. The portion of the first post seen on the main page is less than 400 characters, the second barely more than 500 before you hit the click through. This is totally stupid and unacceptable. Anyone--and I'm talking about sighted people here--who has spent more than 12 seconds on the internet knows how to quickly skip through posts they're not interested in reading. So who is this supposed to help? I have no problem with leaving pictures on a separate page, those take time to download. But There is no excuse for forcing people to do a click and return to just read text.

Now, some are better than others at this. The blog which prompted my first rant about this last year was the TV blog of the New York Post. Engadget used to be fairly good at not doing click throughs, they've recently become one of the worst. Gizmodo is beyond hope in this regard and has been for years, its main page resembles nothing so much as a Twitter feed. But all of the above offenders are rank amatures compared to Alan Sepinwall, who on his main page taunts his readers with cleverly relevant one-liners in place of his actual posts!

But as I've said, the die is cast. The above are now seemingly the rule rather than the exception. Sometimes you just feel better after complaining about something, even though you know it's not going to change.