On the quest for finding a favorite favorites function

8 March 2006 - 10:07am — Laura Scott

Since they launched it a week or so ago, I've been playing with the Technorati Favorites feature. I know that this kind of centralized site tracking is nothing new, but call me a curmudgeon for not appreciating Yahoo's pernicious tracking of all your browsing everywhere. Yes, there are alternatives, but this is where I am this week. (I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow, though.)

technorati faves

One problem with the favorites is that Technorati leaves so little space for actual content. Count me as one of the people who has a monitor larger than 800x600, and find a lot of dead space on the page. This screenshot I took just now has about 550px of live content, and the rest of the roughly 1300px of width is dedicated to a sidebar laden with ads and promotions (about 220px) and a whole lotta white space (some 500px worth). For a page that's supposed to be my resource for tracking sites I like, it's not very efficient.

(Side question: How many Technorati-savvy users actually use 800x600 monitors these days?)

With such limited real estate available, I think I'm going to have to go back to a desktop solution, even though that doesn't feel as fun. At the very least, I think I'm going to have to drop BoingBoing from the list -- they are just too prolific. My faves page has become a BoingBoing feed. I'll just have to go there on my own.

About the author

Laura Scott is a web designer and developer.

Comments

8 March 2006 - 1:18pm — micah (not verified)

Tracking My Favorites on Bloglines

If you haven't tried bloglines.com, you might want to take a look. They do use frames for viewing your feeds, but I think it might actually be one place where frames are used well and appropriately. When combined with tabbed browsing in Firefox, I've found it to be a very effective method for force-feeding myself far too much information.

I currently have 53 feeds in my Bloglines, all sorted into folders for easier consumption, and I read a large percentage of the content right in the bloglines view. For an example of how your BoingBoing feed would look in Bloglines, take a look at http://www.bloglines.com/preview?siteid=66

8 March 2006 - 7:39pm — Laura Scott

Bloglines is another one

I found their interface to be a bit mushy. I cannot count how many times I ended up deleting everying by accident. But you're right, their layout isn't too bad, despite the frames. Maybe I should try again, and hope I'm less of a clutz this time.