I think I have them consolidated now under @mjtsai, although neither the main site nor Discourse seems to have an option to delete an account, so the other is just dormant. Anyway, the reason I mention this here is that I’ve long had different accounts for different purposes, but that’s no longer necessary with the new system. I can now have a single login with separate e-mail addresses for the main site and Discourse. It looks like this will let me keep e-mails for the weekly issues and billing separate from the flood of e-mails from Discourse’s Mailing List Mode. Pretty cool.
Yeah, I don’t claim this is ideal, but some of the ideas I like:
- You can jump to a particular time period without having to click through a long series of “Older” links to previous pages.
- The archive pages themselves are permalinks. Right now, the contents of, say, Weekly Issues Archive - Page 2 of 113 - TidBITS will change to show different issues as new ones come out and push the older ones farther back. So links into the archives will break, and clicking a link from a search engine may not take you to the right content.
- Just titles, no first few sentences. Maybe this is just personal preference, but I find that the extra text gets in the way. I would rather skim through a more compact list of headlines and open background tabs for the ones that look interesting.
- Minimal pagination. TidBITS has a lot more articles than I do, so there would probably need to be some pagination, but I think it could show at least 10x more per page than the current design, especially if just showing titles. It’s just much easier to find things with fewer pages, both because there’s less clicking/waiting and because you can do a Find within the page.