Silverknife - Technology and Making

Image via CrunchBase

This idea struck me as I was working on the upcoming new design for www.silverknife.co.uk, and made the decision to completely cut out the "classic blog view" pages in favour of lean post lists and "highlighted post" boxes.

The blog as we recognise it, a continuously scrolling list of entries in reverse chronological order, became a feature of the web in the late nineties. Content management systems had been around for some time, allowing users to update the content on their websites with user-friendly tools, but they generally required some technical expertise to set up in the first place.

The blog (through popular tool/sites like Blogger and Wordpress), allowed thousands (and eventually millions) of non-techies to create their own websites and share news, opinions, links and photos with the net. The standard design was deliberately simple - new posts at the top, pushing down older content until it fell off the page and into a dated archive.

Simple it is, but there are big design flaws in the classic blog structure. Even with short posts, many blogs ended up with giant, slow-loading main pages going over multiple screens, at a time when the growing web design aesthetic was to keep everything one one screen if at all possible.

Like a lot of people, I read most of my blogs in chronological order - either just to get a sense of the progress of the news, or because they are narratives in which each posts depends on the last. That means a lot of scrolling on a classic blog, sometimes requiring clicking through multiple archive pages and then scrolling right down each one to find the first new post. That's not a good accessible design.

And the big players are showing a steady progression away from the classic design - just look at the top ten blogs on Technorati.

Huffington Post and Gizmodo effectively have newspaper-style front pages, with multiple columns clustering posts together, and generally just a picture and headline or tagline for each item - although both have a reverse-chronological progression down the front page.

Lifehacker, Mashable, Engadget and Ars Technica show only very short clips from each post on their front page, with a link to the rest of the item - generally a graphic predominates each one.

Techcrunch, Smashing Magazine and Blogging Stocks have slightly longer clips for each item, but only Boing Boing retains the endlessly-scrolling, full-text-of-every-post format - of course, being primarily a linkblog, Boing Boing has relatively short posts anyway.

The classic blog is rapidly becoming a relic - so is it time for the big blogging platforms to move toward a new design template? Something a little more twenty-first century? Share your opinions in the comments.