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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.
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.
[cut tag] OR [/cut tag]
Ditto that. As to cut tags, I'd say the best model would be how Del uses them. If your not interested in what's behind them, or the message doesn't really apply to you, you needn't click on them. Simple as that. That said, I thoroughly enjoy Merry's long posts, both for their pithy insights and for the fact that I prefer to scroll through entries rather than click through them. The [Back] button is nice, but sometimes annoying.
Re: [cut tag] OR ![cut tag]
When I wake up and check over whether my friends have posted anything interesting, I'd prefer to note, "Oh, that friend posted a 100+ line survey. I'll come back to it later." and continue looking for highlights than to scroll past the whole 100+ line survey trying to find where the next entry starts.
*shrug* People can post 500 line entries in their LJs all they want, but I reserve the right to whine about it in mine when they do so.
And I never use the back button for reading LJ. When I hit a cut-tag or an entry with comments, I center-click on the link, causing it to open in a new tab. I like my Firebird.
(Geeky aside, shouldn't it be ![cut tag] rather than [/cut tag]? I can't think of a common markup off the top of my head where / indicates Boolean NOT)
Re: [cut tag] OR ![cut tag]
That's a good question, and I don't know for sure. I was going by analogy with html tags.