I’ve been wondering how to go about recycling some of my articles. This isn’t a question of reducing my work load. It’s just that I look back and see some stuff that I’ve written that I think is rather good. That’s especially true when I’m in contemplative moods. I was especially struck by an article I wrote a couple of years back, The Beauty of Abandonment and Decay. Back two years ago, I probably had a tenth of the traffic that I have today. But unfortunately, a blog is not really like an art museum. Or rather it is like an art museum where everything more than three days old is stored in the basement.

Elizabeth has done a great service by going through old articles and commenting on them. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the list on the right of the 20 most recent comments. That used to be a great tool for me, until I figured out that I could read and respond to comments within the WordPress admin area. But it still works as a nice feature for Frankly Curious readers. Or it mostly does. Now there is enough commenting that 20 entries really isn’t enough. I think I’m going to create a comment page for this. There will be a link to it at the link bar at the top of each page.

Still, it would be nice to bring back old articles in a convenient way. There is one thing that I can do that is easy. I can “pin” an old article to the top of the front page. The problem is that it isn’t in the flow of the articles. It just stays there for as long as it is pinned. So I thought I might do that for random posts for the nighttime hours. But this would require that I manually un-pin the post for the start of the next day. And I’m a hard working guy, but I am not up at 5:05 am when the first article is published.

There is another approach to this, which is to simply change the time stamp of an old article. But that screws up the whole idea of a blog. I want to highlight an old article, not pretend that it is a new article. You see, these are the kinds of things that I worry about. I am very much a formalist — but a liberal one. If you read my writing about grammar, you will see that I want to create the simplest rules possible and then stick with them. A good example is my article, The Case Against Apostrophe S. Yes, it may make more sense to write, “Thomas’s train.” But it is easier if we all just decide to write it, “Thomas’ train.” That way we never have to think about whether we need to add another “s” after an apostrophe.

So I want to get this right. And I think I’ve figured out how to do it. I can write a special post that will always be pinned to the top of the front page. And it will provide a link to an old article that I think is worth checking out. I just have to figure out how to make it look appealing. The main thing is that I can leave up a particular article for a few days. But it should take up a small enough space so that it doesn’t get in the way of people seeing what new gem I’ve written.

We’ll see how it goes. If you all hate it, let me know in the comments for it.

I want to take a moment to talk to you about anchor titles. If you are like most people, you probably now have an image of an old-fashioned anchor from a Looney Tunes cartoon. But if you live in the world of computers, you know I am talking about website links. When a link is present in a document, it is done with an anchor (<a>) tag. This is, quite literally, what the web is built on. There would be no “web” without the anchor tag. So we really need to take it seriously.

But here’s the thing: no one likes a link to be a mystery. Before clicking, most people put their mouse over a link to see where it points to. There are lots of reasons for this. For me, avoiding direct links to The New York Times is important, because I only get ten articles per month. (I have a way of avoiding this, but it’s a bit of a pain.) But other reasons include just not being that interested or not trusting the writer to provide useful links. A lot of writers provide silly links — or jokes.

And speaking of jokes, Charlie Pierce provides “optional musical accompaniment” for a lot of his posts. That’s all well and fine, but I want to know what they are. In general, I’m not interested in listening to the song while reading his article; I just want to know what little joke he’s making. And this is in general the case with YouTube — which is notable because it is so common. Unless the writer is very explicit about the content of the video, it is an unwelcome mystery.

The issue came up today because I was editing an article about marketing. The writer had provided a YouTube link with the text, “For example, maybe your brand embodies attractive young people having fun.” What was the video about? It could have been a documentary about the media war between Coke and Pepsi. But it was instead just an old Coke commercial with “attractive young people having fan.” It wasn’t exactly necessary, given that we’ve all seen these kinds of commercials. But I was annoyed that I had to click over. I suspect most readers would have just skipped it.

As a writer or other content creator, it never hurts to assume that your visitors are working. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time figuring out why you linked to a particular thing. Blogs are usually good about this. For example, this page can be linked to like this: Using the Title Attribute With Anchor Tags. That link reads like this:

But it could also be linked like this: Using the Title Attribute With Anchor Tags. This is the actual URL — the one the system uses:

If a URL is relatively self-documenting, I don’t think link titles matter. But when they aren’t, they really do deserve a title. And it isn’t difficult to do. It is just a matter of adding title=”whatever” to your anchor tag. So, for example, a link to Frankly Curious would look like this:

And then the world will be a better place.

A few days back, I saw that I was getting a lot of people clicking onto an article I wrote last month, We’ve Abandoned the Poor in This Country. So I checked where it was coming from, and it was from the Slacktivist blog on one of the best websites around, Patheos. That was thrilling. It’s always thrilling when people link to me — regardless of the size of the site. But it’s especially nice when it is someone who is established. It makes me think that I just may be okay at this writing and ranting thing.

But for some reason, I looked at the source code for the page, and I saw that the link to me used the nofollow relation. At first, I thought this was some reflection on me. But no. That was the case for all of the links on that page — and every other page. It is, as far as I can tell, the default for every link on the Patheos website. What that means is that Patheos does not take part in the single most important aspect of search engine rankings. As far as Google and Bing are concerned, if Patheos links to you, it might as well have not.

What’s the point of this? The nofollow relation was created to stop spam. It was a raging failure. But it has made pretty much all blogging and CMS software default to using this relation. I understand why one might want to use this for comments. Of course, I don’t do it, because I think commenters add value to my site and the least I can go is give them a little boost in their Google ranking. And this creates an interesting disconnect. When TheoLib commented about the link at Slacktivist with the link, that link gives Slacktivist page ranking credit that it doesn’t provide me, even though my link was in the text of that article.

It is just outrageous to put nofollow on all outgoing links. And if a website as established and professional as Patheos is doing this, I think it is time to do something. I think we need to lose nofollow. It doesn’t do what it was originally intended to do. But as a result of a lot of bad conventions, it now distorts the rankings of pages in Google. What’s more, it goes entirely against the idea that Google’s algorithm was originally designed to eliminate: gaming search engine results (although in this case by omission rather than commission).

The vast majority of people who complain about nofollow do so about Wikipedia’s policy. But I don’t blame Wikipedia at all. For one thing, it is kind of like a public utility of the internet. It’s allowed to have special rules. But more to the point, if people knew they could get their Page Rank increased by stuffing links into Wikipedia, it would be open season on that site. It would destroy it as by far the most useful tool on the internet.

The situation with Patheos (and many other sites as well) is that we aren’t talking about content that just anyone can create. This was created by Fred Clark — Mr Slacktivist himself. He’s not going to spam himself. So what is the point of adding nofollow to all his links? To me, it is very much like people who choose not to vote. It is an act of internet citizen neglect. But in this case, I would be shocked if Clark or any of the other writers at Patheos are even aware of the practice.

I’m very fond of the current Frankly Curious publishing schedule. Unfortunately, it’s kind of intense, even if I weren’t doing anything else. But thankfully, I am doing other things, and they are taking a lot of time. The problem isn’t even the writing of articles; it just takes an enormous amount of time reading to come up with six things to post each day. So I’ve decided to change the publishing schedule.

It had occurred to me that I could start posting shorter articles. But when I tried, it seemed that I ended up writing more. Regardless, at this point, there just is a certain level of depth that I expect in an article here: not too short and not too long. Basically, it is the level of depth that I prefer when reading other blogs. If I’m really into a subject, I want the articles to go on and on. But that’s rarely the case for me or anyone else. What’s more, since I’m likely to write about the same thing over time, it makes more sense for me to write a number of short articles rather than one long article.

The point is that I’m not really changing Frankly Curious — just cutting down on the amount of work that I do on it. It will also free me up to throw in non-scheduled articles, which I rarely do anymore. And that will especially be true regarding the first scheduled article I’m killing: the 2:05 pm quotations post. This is something I really like. And under the right conditions, it takes almost no work. But I often find myself flailing around looking for something to use. These are best when they are spontaneous.

As you may have noticed if you have a nose for systems and structures, in addition to the quotations post, there is an anniversary post (5:05 am), a morning music (7:05 am), and three “features” (9:05 am, 11:05 am, and 5:05 pm). The anniversary and music posts have to stay. People tend to comment a fair amount on the anniversary posts, and as best as I can tell, they enjoy the music posts. I’ve come to see them as the very core of Frankly Curious. And even though they can be a bit of work, they are fun to do.

So the obvious place to attack is on the “features.” I’m going to cut them down to just two. Hopefully, this will allow me to expand the breadth of what I write about. It seems I often get bogged down in politics and economics — ranting about things I’ve already ranted about. I’d like to do one post on politics and one on something else. But we will see. It’s generally easier to find things to talk about regarding politics. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t expect it to be a catastrophe, but you never know. One of the rules that guides my life is: all change is for the worse. While not always true, it is a good first approximation.

So here is the new schedule:

5:05 am — Anniversary Post
8:05 am — Morning Music
11:05 am — Feature (Probably Politics)
4:05 pm — Feature (Hopefully Not Politics)

But otherwise, you can expect the same whatever level of insight and entertainment that you’ve come to depend upon here at Frankly Curious. I’m consistent at whatever level I operate.

This is just a brief note to update you on the happenings here. I’m working a lot away from Frankly Curious, so it’s been a bit difficult to keep up on comments. I am glad to see that some of you are talking to each other, which doesn’t require my response (not that I don’t stick my nose in anyway). So I’ve upped the number of comments that display on the sidebar at the right from 10 to 20. I found I was falling behind by more than 10, and it can be difficult to find old comments.

By the way, if you haven’t discovered the comment list on the right, you should check it out. It is really handy! I used to depend upon it. But I have since learned that I can manage comments from within the administration area for the blog. This is really convenient for me. At the same time, I often have to go over to the page to see what you all are talking about. So if you could provide a bit of context, it would be really helpful — but hardly required.

And now that I’ve written this, there probably won’t be any comments for the next month. But for the record, I really do appreciate comments. In fact, I might feel bad about them if I made any money off this site. But as it is, I consider commenters collaborators. And so I try to take them serious and respond when appropriate — even when people are yelling at me. (FYI: I tend to yell back in those circumstances; I’m the only fool I suffer gladly.)