Previous & Next

Since I started publishing a little more often in the Weblog, I came to realise that blog navigation is slightly different to the navigation that's appropriate for articles (within the "Distractions" section for example).

With articles, the only navigation that's required is a list of links to other articles in that section, a menu. So I have a menu titled "In this Section..." on every article, which provides links to its siblings by title. The menu, in true Jakob Nielsen tradition, never has links that point to the current page. When accessing articles, users can discriminate, selectively choosing pages in a non-linear manner, otherwise known as random access.

With a weblog, it's a little different. So, in our weblog, "In this Section..." becomes "Recent Entries..." and the links are displayed by date, in a calendar format with the current and previous months shown.

So far so good. However, based on my own usage of other weblogs and through carefully study of the Urban Mainframe access logs, I have come to realise that a weblog is not navigated randomly. Users tend to "walk-through" the entries in a lineal fashion, otherwise known as serial access.

Obviously then, I needed to make serial navigation easy. Hence the "prev" and "next" buttons that I have added to the weblog. Now, regardless of your starting point in the weblog, you can quickly and easily walk-through the entries in chronologically sorted order.