As you probably know, I have a list of blogs that I visit daily. I often find that a link from one blog will lead me down a path several sites deep. After finding that nothing else looks interesting, I back out of the list and continue browsing.
To illustrate with an example, today I visited Matt’s blog and followed his link to Meg‘s article, The sanctity of elements. It was a very engaging read, but before I could finish it, I found myself perusing the prose of Mr. Usability Man, discussing the Top 10 mistakes of web design. Superb list by the way. I feel like Jakob has nestled himself right into my brain and managed to suck out my thoughts. I’ve gotten flack about sacrificing “cool” features for the sake of usability, but I continue to believe that a web site is infinitely better if everyone can use it. I dislike sites that use technologies which often give you unnecessary features, unless the feature is crashing your browser, but alas, I digress. After reading Jakob’s article and seeing that most of the links were to his site, I began the process of backing out, or popping sites off the stack. Pop number one put me back at Megnut’s article, which was void of more links. Pop. Back at Matt’s site, which didn’t have any more new content. Pop. Back to my blog links page to begin the click-diving once more.
Wasn’t that some good clean fun? Here’s another popping adventure I had. This one started at Kottke and zipped over to Don’t Mention It. Careful, this next move is only for the more experienced. I performed what is known as a parallel dive, by going to see what the source of kottke’s link had to say about the article that I had already gone to. In that case, I read the article, then read what beebo had said about it and returned to kottke.
Clicking and popping is the main way I browse the web nowadays, with sites popping around like the balls in a Corn Popper. Plus, when site popping, you don’t have to worry about arthritis or swelling of the knuckles. In fact, you can have more fun than a crocodile in a rabbit hatch and it’s much less gruesome.