fmaury/seirdy.one
1
0
Fork 0
mirror of https://git.sr.ht/~seirdy/seirdy.one synced 2024-09-19 20:02:10 +00:00
Code Issues Projects Releases Wiki Activity

New note: "On displaying word counts"

Browse source
This commit is contained in:
Rohan Kumar 2022-05-29 12:02:15 -07:00
parent 12d693690e
commit 7c9013dfec
No known key found for this signature in database
GPG key ID: 1E892DB2A5F84479
1 changed files with 18 additions and 0 deletions
Show stats Download patch file Download diff file Expand all files Collapse all files

18
content/notes/on-wordcounts.md Normal file
View file

@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
---
title: "On displaying word counts"
date: 2022-05-29T12:00:04-07:00
---
<aside role="note">
Reply to {{< mention-work itemprop="about" itemtype="SocialMediaPosting" reply=true >}}{{<cited-work name="What's your opinion on writing the number of words in a blog post and the estimated time it'll take to read it?" url="https://social.treehouse.systems/@ayushnix/108364036611051719">}} by {{<indieweb-person first-name="Ayush" last-name="Agarwal" url="https://microblog.ayushnix.com/" itemprop="author">}}
{{</mention-work>}}
</aside>
Some of my posts are long. My longest post is almost 20k words as of right now (60-80 pages printed out), and will get longer as I update it. A WebKit browser
Length is an imperfect yet useful measure of the amount of detail one can expect. There are many "lists of practices" on the Web about web design. By communicating that mine would take an hour and a half to read, I communicate that my list has some more thought put into it.
This also signals to some people that they should probably bookmark the article for later so they can read it properly, or helps them prioritize shorter articles first.
> Someone who may end up reading an entire post after going through a paragraph or two may be scared away if they know it'll take them 30 minutes to go through it.
I think these people would be scared off regardless, simply by seeing how much they have to scroll through. They might also feel overwhelmed by the number of entries in the table of contents. That's why I include a "TLDR" or explicitly recommend skipping from the introduction straight to the conclusion for readers in a hurry.