The Addon Junkie

So I’ve received a bit of email and in the interest of not being one of those webmasters who ignores the needs and wants of his readers I’ve made a couple of minor changes to the site. Most of you probably won’t notice most of them, but there is one that is likely to be noticed and I felt the need to explain myself.

Videos now appear “after the break.” For those of you not yet fluent in the terminology of the blogosphere, “after the break” refers to anything that does not appear on the main page of the site, but shows in the full text of a post. You can access “after the break” content by clicking the title, the “more” button or the link at the end of the article – they’ll all take you to the full text. In some cases authors use the break to keep a very long article from taking over the main page, in others it is used to artificially inflate traffic and advertising revenue since people will have to view your page more times to take in all the content. I was specifically trying to avoid that second one since it’s a pretty sneaky and dishonest tactic that offends readers and advertisers alike. So why are the videos after the break now? It’s in the interest of load times, bandwidth and readability. I’ve received some emails saying that my main page was taking a long time to load, especially for people on slower broadband or even dialup connections. I’ve also received a few emails saying that some RSS readers were choking on the embed code. Worse yet, some people were complaining that a separate instance of Flash loads for each embedded video and can bog down slower computers. In the interest of ensuring the best user experience for the largest number of people possible, I’m moving the bandwidth and resource intensive videos to a place where they will have the least impact.

Everything in web design is a trade-off and I am well aware that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” so maybe some of you dislike the new way even more. Maybe this was a bad move. Unfortunately I won’t really know until I try. If you love the change, hate the change, or want to suggest another please let me know in the comments below or feel free to email me at enmaku@theaddonjunkie.com.

Oh, by the way, The Addon Junkie now has a Facebook page! We still need about 13 more followers to get our custom URL and make it official, so if you like what you see here and want to help out, here’s a quick, easy and free way to do so: become a fan!