Comments on: Smashing Magazine’s follies

By: Alexander Veer

Alexander Veer — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:55:59 +0000

Call me old fashioned but I think it lies in the nature of the medium. Most popular blogs are simply an aggregate of popular items– not necessarily /good items/.

By: KrazyCeltic

KrazyCeltic — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 02:48:51 +0000

What gets me about the “Top 10″ posts (which are more frequently “Top 50!!” and “Top 75!!!!1!”) is the information overload. I can filter through what I need/want/think-is-quality pretty well, but am annoyed when hammered with too much information at once. These could be real time-wasting traps for people. Might be fine for beginners and students, or people with dozens of other higher priority tasks they should be working on, but it’s a pain in my clock.

Regarding your first complaint about SM’s use of a function named doSomething(), I think we can give them the benefit of the doubt here. The non-descriptive name is just a generic placeholder, not a suggestion: that section of the article is about unobtrusive code, not semantics. This doesn’t invalidate your point about choosing smart function/class names, which is good for beginners and veterans alike to heed, but I think we should give SM the benefit of the doubt on this one, as out of scope and just an innocent use of generic placeholder.

By: Shane

Shane — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:49:38 +0000

I also think that a list is easier to write than an in-depth article. It’s simply pointers to other blog posts where the real hard work has been done.

By: James

James — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:11:34 +0000

Farrhad, thanks for subscribing!

Ryan, yeh I totally agree! It seems the “top 10″ type posts are becoming more and more popular, even I have succumbed to it on my other blog, which, because of a lack of inspiration I’ve pretty much abandoned! The popularity of these types of posts are probably a reflection of the fast-moving nature of this industry – everyone is in a rush!

Shane, Oops! It was a bit of a faux pas, but I’ll leave it in there, I enjoy the irony!

By: Shane

Shane — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:52:09 +0000

I agree with your AJAX-Solutions comment. It seems that AJAX is now the moniker formerly known as DHTML (yuk!).

One of the Internet’s greatest strengths – that for most people, publishing content is very easy and unregulated, means that the accuracy of that content is sometimes questionable.

Was the spelling of inaccuracy (innaccruacy) in the final comment a bit of British irony, or an embarrassing faux pas?

That last sentence was a bit of British humour, not a dig

By: Ryan Townsend

Ryan Townsend — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:15:31 +0000

I have grown sick of websites which post lists of tutorials, it seems asif they look to get the greatest number of items rather than quality, and it’s often just a cop out for writing their own content. Also when developing websites and web apps I believe it you should be researching “How do I create feature X best?” rather than “Where can I use this new technology I discovered recently?” which often ends in superfluous AJAX and JavaScript effects.

By: Farrhad A

Farrhad A — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:03:08 +0000

“I’m sick of these high-flying blogs serving up crap content! Many novices will take these words as gospel and because of the continual innaccruacy of Smashing Magazine’s technical articles I doubt these novices will have a solid foundation.”

That is sooo true.

Anyways, have subscribed to your blog to stay tuned with your posts