0r3jq4a0j
Joined 14 years ago
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31
Submissions
15
Member since
Oct 3
Recent submissions
Comment · 14 years ago
Partially broken on iOS.
Comment · 14 years ago
There's a power law distribution, as usual, but it's not very much. IIRC, it generally maxes out $80-$120K, with a select few making more.
Comment · 14 years ago
It's a Rails application and it does reflect the structure. It's the edit action on a controller, likely the UsersController. It looks like they tried to implement a user management system using has_secure_password and didn't know enough to do it properly.
They therefore created a default resource structure (probably using the rails scaffold generator command) which includes the id in the URL on all member routes, including the route for the edit action.
Comment · 14 years ago
Paginating lists or paginating arbitrarily within long text content? There is a massive difference between the two.
Comment · 14 years ago
not the editorial and reporting experience that leads to good copy
Writing, content strategy, curation, copywriting, etc are obviously all important skills. However, being an editor does not remotely qualify someone to run a multimillion dollar business, design software, dictate engineering decisions, etc. Unfortunately, the industry is structured such that they are doing exactly that.
Is it any surprise that slate's division is operating at a loss? It's the norm in a broken industry.
Comment · 14 years ago
your general disdain for writers and editors
It's completely justified. For example: show me where in Poltz's long career as a writer and editor that he secretly squeezed in the years of UX, design, and development experience that qualifies him to make a statement about designing user interfaces.
The problem is that editors simply don't believe there is special expertise here or that it requires anything beyond their insight.
I admit that I'm not always happy with the result ... http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/astrophysics/the-cosmolog...
This design doesn't incorporate many of the base standards for displaying long-form web content. Font size is way too small (should be 16-18px, 14px absolute minimum), column is too wide ("ideal" is 66 characters, though there's a wide range). A good starter article: http://informationarchitects.net/blog/100e2r/ There are many, many more.
Until that page is completely redesigned and returned to a readable baseline, it's difficult to discuss or test anything.
Comment · 14 years ago
If it didn't improve their revenues, they wouldn't be doing it.
I can assure you that this is absolutely not the case. If you look at Plotz's comment, it's exactly what most editors will say:
Pages that run too long can irritate readers. We run stories of 2,000, 4,000, even 6,000 words, and to run that much text down a single page can daunt and depress a reader. So pagination can make pages seem more welcoming, more chewable.
They really believe this.
It's important to realize that despite all the buzz about A/B testing in the industry, editors pretty universally believe they don't need to validate their opinions through testing. Why not? Because though school and their careers they've been told that their opinions matter, and, in fact, that's all their job really is: voicing opinions and making judgements, because they believe they have special insight into what readers want.
Look no further than Poltz, a writer and editor with no software design or development experience, who somehow believes he's qualified to make that statement.