paging: blog writers: hello !?!

one of my pet peeves is a blog that doesn’t have links to view previous pages of content. it works like this:

something i’m reading has a link to some random blog. i follow it, find the article interesting, and wonder what else of interest might be on this blog. so, i go to the home page and start reading. typically i get to read 5-10 articles and then get to the bottom of the page.

first tip: if your blog only shows one or two articles per page, change it. i don’t want to click and wait that often — i’ll end up leaving.

at the bottom i frequently find, well, nothing. i’m looking for a ‘next page,’ ‘more articles,’ ‘older entries,’ or something of the sort. i am amazed at how often there’s nothing there. sometimes i simply close the window at this point. occasionally i scroll back to the top looking for the links there, although i almost never find them.

i have, on occasion, gone digging into the archives section. even then, it’s usually impossible to find a way to get to a substantial portion of older content. the site i was just at showed about 10 articles for a given month, then an incomplete list of links to some more articles from that month (including duplicate links for all the articles above). still no pager though.

lame. don’t make visitors work that hard to read your site. if your blog or other content-drive site doesn’t have the ability to easily page through older content, you’re losing readers. fix it.