Open question

[marcmagus]

Am I the only person who is more likely to read a long post if it's behind a cut tag?

Further discussion on how I read my friends page, and other issues of kind formatting follow.


When I'm reading my friends page and get to an entry longer than the screen, I'm likely to decide I don't have the time/energy to read it and move on, possibly skimming it to see if anything jumps out at me. If I see a paragraph or two followed by a cut tag, I'll read the couple paragraphs. Most of the time, whatever's in them hooks me enough that I want to read th erest of the entry.

Also, my monitor is 800x600 pixels. I lose about 20 pixels from the right side of the screen for the scrollbar and a little bit of margin. I lose about 240 pixels from the left side for margin, user icons, time, and unnecessary whitespace. That leaves me with approximately 540 pixels of horizontal space. If something is forced to be wider than this (such as an embedded image in a post), Firebird sizes the table used to format all the entries wide enough to accomodate it, and gives me a horizontal scrollbar. It then helpfully flows all text to the full width of the table, which is wider than my screen. I then have to play with the scrollbar setting so entries fit on the screen.

Usually, this results in my being able to read entries, but having to scroll left to find out who wrote them if I can't tell by the style -- annoying, but not the end of the world. Occasionally, somebody will post an image or other fixed-width component which is at least 800 pixels wide. Then I get really annoyed. At this width, the text is wider than my screen, and I have to scroll back and forth to read each line anywhere on my friends page! This makes me contemplate removing people from my friends list. The worst is if it's not an image, because then I can't even suppress offsite images to make everything readable again.

Ok, enough ranting. Please be kind to my friends page. It makes me happier, and more likely to read what you have to say.

Comments

[halflingmerry.livejournal.com]

I hate cut tags for various reasons (though I actually cut-tagged my latest post before reading this ;-) but that's 'cause it's 12 pages long in Word—I didn't write it alone, incidentally) and am perfectly resigned to and acceptant of the probability of being unfriended for my lengthy posts. wylddelirium has done it, and that's fine. Especially since she gave me fair (if indirect) warning beforehand. ;-) In any case, I do try to avoid the kind of fixed-width components you mention (ever since you informed me that I'd done so last year), 'cause I hate it when my friends page is screwed with as well.

So I disagree with one point (the one for which I'm a prime offender, of course) and very much agree with another.

P.S. ...Oh yes. I don't expect my friends to actually read the entirety of my huge posts. Perhaps it's cluttering up their friends pages... but that's how I choose to use LJ: I've friended myself so that I can only look at my friends page to see everything at once rather than bring my "Recent Entries" page into it.