Welcome all!

[dave_littler]

Welcome to Dave Littler’s Tall Blog of Strength! An entertainment blog about entertaining things for the purposes of entertaining people!

There’s a good many reasons why you might be here, and a good many things to see now that you are. For your ease, your convenience, your entertainment and possibly even education, I have prepared for you this

Comments

[paul_reeve]

Dave, I must admit I'm a little annoyed by having to scroll down to find the newest entry every time I load up your page. Feel free to delete this comment, but I think it would be good if you at least made the details of this entry click-through, so that I can see at a glance if anything's gone up since the last time I looked at your page.

[dave_littler]

I get what you're saying, but this serves a very specific purpose; whenever anyone visits my journal for the first time, they'll be immediately greeted by not only a sense of what sort of a journal this is, but also a selection of its best and brightest entries.

A lot of times, I'll be off posting in this or that Livejournal community, someone will take an interest in my comments or contribution, they'll click my name and have a look at what's here. This way, no matter what I may have been posting about recently whenever they do so, their first impression should always be a positive and engaging one.

It's playing to the "social networking" side of Livejournal.

[paul_reeve]

I get the idea, but there must be some better way to do it. You could make it a click-through so the next entry is visible without scrolling, at least?

[dave_littler]

I'll see if I can devise a way, but I must admit I'm having difficulty conceiving of one.

It seems to me that a single push of the "page down" key on your leyboard ought to be sufficient for the task, and no more onerous than a single mouse click.

[paul_reeve]

*You* having trouble coming up with a creative solution to a little design problem? That's not the Dave I know!

On my laptop page-down requires holding down the Function key and pressing the down arrow, and it takes two of those to get to the actual text of the most recent entry, a move that also makes that entry's title disappear - so seeing both title and body text takes finer manipulations.

The point isn't that it's genuinely hard work to see the second entry. It's just that seeing a huge block of the same old text each time I load up your blog, forever, seems inelegant and pointless.

There must be some good way to add a highly visible and easily recognized "New here?" link to this entry, or to a page with the same content, somewhere at the top. This guy, for example, has a small collection of highly visible customized links at the very top of his Livejournal:
http://awanderingbard.livejournal.com/

[dave_littler]

Oh, WELL! I could do THAT easily enough. The thing is, I know that people are almost indescribably lazy, and if I put up a "New here? Click here!" Entry up top, nobody - NOBODY - will ever, ever, ever click that link. It will be like unto a shrine dedicated to the concepts of laziness, apathy and incuriosity, undisturbed and pristine for all the ages to come.

No, if I want people to see such text, I need to put it front and centre, where they cannot help but read it.

[paul_reeve]

While this might be a way to keep the attention of lazy casual strangers, it's an odd way to treat your regular readers. If you leave it like this, yours will be the only site among dozens I regularly look at for freshly updated content (blogs, newspapers, journals, news aggregators, etc) where no trace whatsoever of that new content is visible when I first load the page! And while I won't say I'm not going to visit your site for that reason, I do wish you would find some other way to do what you're doing here. Nothing like a challenge to your ingenuity, old friend!

[zeddidragon]

Here's what you do:

Read Dave's journal from your Friends page. That first post there won't show up because it's set in the future. At least, that's how my friend's page act.

[dave_littler]

Zeddidragon's wisdom is strong!

http://paul-reeve.livejournal.com/friends?show=P

Just use this as your bookmark, and your problem is solved.

[paul_reeve]

Meh. It does work! But your actual blog's "first entry" is still a gigantic block of unchanging text filling up the visible area upon loading, as well as after one Page Down. No site whose main attraction is regular fresh content should hide that content from the users arriving on the page. But whatever, it's your blog, and who am I to question the design sensibilities of the maker of Dave Littler's New Deal?

Is there an RSS feed for this thing?

[gracilejenn]

I'm not quite sure how I ended up at your journal, but I'm very glad I did! I just wanted to say that I've enjoyed it, and that I am adding you so I can continue to be amazed by your wit.

[dave_littler]

And a pleasure to have you! And no less so for the fact that your having done so brings the total number to have done so to an even two hundred; a milestone by any measure!

I hope you stick around, enjoy that which is to come, and comment on that which you enjoy. :)

[heythereyazy]

i hope you dont mind me adding you! i stumbled appon your journal after hours of searching around for some information for an essay.. somehow, searching about the jury system lead to your post from over a year ago about being called in for jury duty. though i must say it didn't help my essay even the slightest bit, it was a good read, so i couldn't help but add you~ :3

[heythereyazy]

err
*upon, even.

[dave_littler]

Oh, well, hardly a surprise there! My Tall Blog of Strength is the #1 jury-related blog on the web (at least as reckoned by my spontaneously-generated regulatory board, The Commision for Quality in Flim-Flam, Malarky and Spurious Claims)!

Anyways! Welcome aboard. Have a look around my tags there, see what you like, and by all means, post a comment or two when the spirit moves you. The converaations here can be fairly robust.