Rick,
FWIW, I never knew about the comments-in-a-popup thing until 30 seconds ago. Every time I’ve come to Coding Horror, it’s been because I’ve been linked and found the link via Talk Digger (http://www.talkdigger.com). That links me right to the permalink, which shows all the comments on one page. I like that user experience but can’t stand comments in a popup.
Jeff, you are now the official Blog Sheriff. It is your duty to flush out blogs/bloggers that don’t quite meet International Jeff Blog Standards and summarily spank them. Oh, wait, you already have! Oh, well then, keep up the, uh, good work.
I certainly see the points you’re making and I am a big advocate of UI. However, all this to me is a touch like nit-picking. Didn’t you just recently say that content is king?
I for one like seeing all the differences in blogs. Yes, even the annoying ones sometimes. We don’t want all blogs looking alike, now do we. It’s differences (annoying or not) that, in addition to content, of course, set them all apart and give them personality.
That’s how I see it from here. Later.
Jonathan F.:
That idea is fscking fantastic. Then again, why not do it with the comments section and comment form too?
A lot of it is just the way particular blog software does things (probably copied from the way every other piece of blog software). For example, achieving more than very basic archive browsing with Movable Type requires a lot of template editing and configuration, and nobody really has time to do too much of that stuff – that’s why we use premade blog software to begin with.
Also, I’d like to express my critique about your blog Jeff: the comments popping into a new window. Why? 
Reed
Perhaps the icons would be better served in black and white or slightly opaque.
For me, your design the long list of links under Archives is visual noise, all these blue links with no distinctive visual call out. Why would anyone want to search my month anyway?
BTW, I took these comments to heart and restructured some things on my blog.
a href="http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/"http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet//a
Thanks for the feedback.
I think you’re missing a great opportunity, Jeff. You need to just add a whole bunch of those links on your own sidebar. Instead of the images, though, use individual characters from the Webdings font. Just as informative, no?
We don’t want all blogs looking alike, now do we
The pursuit of simplification doesn’t mean everything has to look alike.
why do NASCAR sponsors teams want their vehicles to look like NASCAR vehicles
Because they get paid a lot of money by sponsors. Which is also the reason some sites look the way they do…
Who are you people and what makes you think the world cares about your blogs? Bloggers must absolutely be the most vain and pretentious people to ever innundate the net with useless search engine results. I stumbled across this, and all the serious discussion between you all about some kind of little hype buttons on somebodys little diary about nothing, and I have to wonder… Has the blogging community ever stepped back and wondered why anyone on earth would care about how your day went or your opinion on the latest news story? Go talk to your friends at the watercooler, and stop creating search engine spam. What is the library of congress was diluted with 16 million diaries. Good luck finding facts or useful data in there anymore… It’s not the little icons that are noise. It’s the blogs themselves.
Just looking through my own blog, I decided to take the XHTML valid indicator out. Not that it matters anyway since Blogger’s nav bar is not XHTML compliant anyway.
I think cutting off the main/archive text to a separate page does make sense. Especially when your articles are pretty long. I haven’t found a feature in blogger similar to the lj-cut so the closest thing I did was though CSS and cut it after a few lines or so. Although it only works with Firefox.
I especially liked the style of Tom’s site http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/
One note on the Monthly Archive thing. I think its not a bad idea to get rid of it, considering I have Google search on my blog anyway.
I use a sidebar for some extra navigation. However, the side bar tends to get short and the page looks unbalanced which is why I have the big AdSense on the main page.
I don’t bother with the syndication links or RSS feed links. All the RSS browsers or other RSS tools I’ve used would be able to pull the information out from the meta data anyway.
Excellent post as usual Jeff, I followed your advice after reading this. I was amazed to find that I had 28 links on my blog that I never clicked, and chances are no one else did either. So I stripped away all of them, and I think the focus is now solely on the content.
Good work.
Des
More useful would be if these icons, instead of launching the url to bookmark the item, launched the url to view the item in the service (e.g. http://del.icio.us/url/http://www.codinghorror.com, or whatever the delicious path is) so that the user who doesn’t use the service could be exposed to the utility (what people who bookmarked the page also bookmarked, what else was tagged with the same tags, user comments, etc.), the relative strengths of the different services (I certainly don’t know why someone would use something other than delicious), etc. Along the same lines as trackback (e.g. this post was bookmarked in these social services and here is the link to the information generated…).
I’ve frequently thought about links to the next article on YOUR page. I like that they are easy to find at the top and after the article, but what about after I’ve read all the comments? I always have to scroll up.
I think cutting off the main/archive text to a separate page does make sense. Especially when your articles are pretty long. I haven’t found a feature in blogger similar to the lj-cut so the closest thing I did was though CSS and cut it after a few lines or so. Although it only works with Firefox.
shabby
the horror content looks very interesting.
…
GAYATHRI
Social">http://www.esteembpo.com]Social Media Marketing
Er… the text is invisible when the google ad is in view. As soon as I scroll away from it it appears again., I can also select the text to make it appear but it dissapears as soon as I scroll.
Thanks for the great comparison of blog appearance and Nascar vehicles. The many stickers and advertisements on the vehicles can be really distracting, but they have the benefit of traveling at such high speeds during a race, the individual ads blur into a tolerable color. With a blog though, no such high speeds are possible. When writing about topics like shopping, masonry or blogging dos and don’ts, the page will be viewed at reading pace only.