I had this naive hope that actually if you got rid of almost all the MBAs and kept things small and the writers owned the enterprise, there’d be enough of a business left that we, the audience, wouldn’t have to sit through all of the same stupid bullshit that’s ruined the rest of the internet. But no: this seemingly-insignificant “feature” is fractal, and if you zoom far enough out the picture you’ll see is of a guy handing a receptive Alex Balk a business card with “SEO” printed on it somewher.
Now I see how foolish I was being, and now I know the truth: the truly transformative blog can only exist if it’s based out of a utopian seasteading community. But then it’ll be perfect.
So… this is probably a pretty n00bish question, but why is pagination so bad?
Mostly because it’s a cynical way to boost pageview stats. But also because no one asked for it. Why are we breaking things into pages? If people want this functionality, it should be done on the client side. It tends to make printing more difficult, it leads to incorrect URLs being sent around, it stops users from queueing up tabs of content for offline reading, it takes a long time if you’re on a mobile device… It’s inconveniencing your readers to get your numbers up.
Ahh… but there must be some pros, no? Faster(ish) loading? Or something?
Not really. Less text means a slightly smaller amount of text to load, sure. But text is really small, and even smaller once compressed (most webservers run everything through gzip compression). It’s dwarfed by any images on the page, which may or may not be cached by your browser depending on your settings. But more important than absolute size of the resources to be transferred is the number of connections your browser will need to set up and tear down in order to load the page. Typically there’s one for the main page, then one for every stylesheet, javascript file, image and flash resource on the page. That all gets needlessly duplicated if you’re paginating things.
So yeah: it’s really just about the pageviews.
Soon, there’ll be a nice candy-colored “view as single page” button! I also hope that we can make it a stored preference for users who dislike pagination. (I like pagination aesthetically, myself.)
And, you know: it’s too bad that there’s commerce in this world, and that Alex Balk is forced to exchange money for goods and services to, like, stay alive and stuff! I don’t mean that totally sarcastically–it actually IS too bad. But here we are. And I would like him to make money and eat and buy some new pants once a year.
And also most of the paginated items are image-heavy, you’ll see. Anyway! On with my life.