Conjurer of internet magic

It's time to put an end to bad blog page navigation buttons.  Tumblr blogs are probably the worst offender of them all since I read 10 Tumblr blogs for every 1 "other" kind of blog.  You're probably wondering what I'm talking about, so let me explain.  There are two offenses that I see.  The first offense is not having labels on the pagination buttons.  The other offense is using "Next" and "Previous" on pagination buttons.

The Wrong Way

No Labels
Not having labels on your pagination buttons could possibly be the worst thing ever.  I know that if I'm on page #1 that I have one choice to click, but what about any other page?  I would have to guess which button I want to use, and this usually means having to look at the status bar to see if the pages are going up or down.

Next/Previous Buttons
This is not nearly as annoying as not having labels on your pagination buttons, but it can still be quite confusing.  Here again, once I've gone to older content pages I now lose the context for what "next" and "previous" mean.  Does "next" mean the next newer page or the next older page?  To make this more confusing, some sites I've seen swap the words around so that "previous" means older and "next" means newer. Unless you have a page numbers sandwhiched between these two buttons for context stop using this method!

The Right Way

Older/Newer Buttons
Using the words "older" and "newer" provide the right amount of context.  These words let the user know which way they want to go on the blog regardless of if they started on page 9 or page 1.

I know we are still a month away from the new year, but one can never be too prepared for it.  I was challenged the other day about the impact that a person can have by preparing for the future.  The question proposed to me was as follows:

What should you start doing today that 10 years from now you'll be very happy you started doing?

My goal at this point is to figure out the answer to that question by the end of the year.

Now that I'm a dad (I say that as if it just happened, which it didn't, it has already been 7 and a half years) I've noticed that I play games with my children that my own dad used to play with me.  Two of these games that I recall enjoying were Steamroller and Daddy Porcupine.

The Steamroller game involves the dad laying on the ground and rolling along the floor with whichever child wants to be "crushed" by the steamroller.  Strangely enough (which really isn't all that strange) the boys like this game way more than the girls.  I've tried to do this with two children at once, but that was just a bad idea and involved lots of crying.

Perhaps the strangest game I remember was what my dad called Daddy Porcupine.  I honestly don't know why I liked it so much, since it involved my dad rubbing his beard stubble on my face and pretending he was a porcupine.  But I remember laughing and trying to get away from him, so it must have been fun.  I thought I'd try this one on Sam to see if it had the same results.  Indeed, he enjoys evading my beard stubble as much as I remember trying to get away from my dad's.

I keep thinking about these games and what makes them so fun for a child.  My main conclusion is that it's not as much about what is being played, but the intentional time spent having fun with the child.  I've also realized that it's as much fun to be the dad as it is to be the child.

If you use Tumblr's API for anything I thought I'd let you know about a rather annoying bug that I found the other day.  The bug is related to how Tumblr returns posts and the inability to specify any other type of ordering.  Hopefully, this will help someone who might be scratching their head and wondering why things don't look right.

At Virb we've been rocking the Tumblr API v1 and just recently upgraded to v2.  One of the reasons for upgrading  (besides the inevitable deprecation of v1) was to take advantage of the much more reliable and stable v2.  After the upgrade we definitely saw better stability, but we also started seeing help tickets about out of order posts.  I quickly looked into how to fix this and found nothing to fix the ordering that Tumblr was providing.

I knew either I was doing something wrong, which was highly likely, or something wasn't right with Tumblr's API.  I ended up emailing them and got back a pretty speedy response.  Here's what I got back:

"The post are coming back on date ordered by id order. These people if the used the api to back date items would see this." [sic]

So essentially, the v2 API returns posts in descending order by id BUT, if someone changes the date AFTER the post has been officially posted, the post most likely will be out of order.  I asked if there was any way to order chronologically and I have received no response.

I'm sure Tumblr had their reasons for ordering by id, but if you have an API to pull data from a system that is highly chronological, it would make sense that you would provide a way (especially since it was default on the old API) to pull those posts chronologically.