I’ve updated the <a href="http://www.stefangeens.com/links.html"links page, adding many new links and taking out the ones I never visited (and hence you probably never did either). I also did a redesign, which you will like better once you are used to it. For those who absolutely hate it, the old links page is still here.
Also, if you’ve been using this page as your start page and there are sites you visit regularly but can’t find here, please signal them and I will consider adding them.
TNYRoB? Do you mean the New York Review? TNYRob, indeed. Media News (the erstwhile MediaGossip) has now officially changed its name to Romenesko. NYToday is all but dead. I’d add appleturns.com to the Apple links (which I think shouldn’t be called .Mac, that’s a bit silly). I do think that the links should change colour when visited like all other links (and like they did before). I visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/diary every day, so you might want to add that, but I don’t know where. What no Yahoo? No Amazon? No eBay? http://www.mcsweeneys.net/ is somewhere I visit occasionally, and have enjoyed in the past. http://www.nealpollack.com/ should be added to the blogs, along with http://www.nickdenton.org/ and http://www.davosnewbies.com/; I also like http://www.bookslut.com/blog.html and http://www.popfactor.com/tmftml/. Good economic commentary can be found at http://indiawest.blogspot.com/ and good political commentary at http://www.tnr.com/etc.mhtml. You might want to consider adding http://www.worldnewyork.net/ to your NY blogs, and there’s got to be somewhere you can put http://newyork.craigslist.org/. And then, of course, there’s the porn — don’t tell me you don’t have anything along those lines bookmarked.
Oh, and I’m also fond of http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/ for news.
Great, thanks. WIll add/alter/tweak tonight. Clarice and Zed are in town and we are off to the archipelago today.
Very good, putting all those links in! Now I think you should reverse the colour of the visited and the unvisited links. Once you’ve clicked somewhere, the link colour should fade away a little, as though the link has been “used” a little.
You’d think that’s how it should be, and it works on conventional pages, but for the links page highlighting the links you visit often works, because you create your own subset of important (to you links) with the gray ones in the background, suggesting but not insisting they be part of your life.
It’s an experiment. My next favorite is still no historical cues.
When you say “often works”, do you mean that this bizarre topsy-turvy world of your links page has been replicated elsewhere with successful outcome, or do you mean “should work if everybody were to think like me”? While your logic might make some sense, the fact is that your usability is in the toilet: people are used to web pages behaving in a certain way, and when they come across a page which doesn’t behave that way, they get confused and disoriented. Maybe if you were inventing internet protocols from scratch you should do this. But better you speak the same visual language as everybody else than that you try to force people to learn a new visual language whenever they visit your links page.
I often visit the Laurens Janszoon Coster site (http://cf.hum.uva.nl/dsp/ljc/), especially when I’m feeling frustrated because I might be loosing touch with my maternal language (and heritage, for that matter)…