Usability Crimes

I have an entirely new reason to dislike James Lileks. I'm not going to complain today about his insufferable whininess, his arguments with liberal straw men, his tendency to talk about political issues without letting a single fact of actual opposing view come into play. No, none of that. I will not even comment on the questionable taste he showed relating a dream about being caught in a tsunami. No, today's reason to loathe Lileks is his unspeakable crimes against users of his web site.

While most blogs (like this one) use a standard format - new posts at the top, older ones below, dated archives of the old stuff - Lileks has created a new and completely unusable way to organize his site.

If you go to the blog, you get the current post. At the bottom is a calendar labeled "This Month" that, in theory, you can use to navigate to other posts. There's no actual month label on it, and it's unclear what month he's actually displaying... because if you go to the current post, and scroll down to the "this month" calendar, and click on, say, 26, a post appears. A blog from the future.

His archive is even weirder. There's a main page with years and months. If you click on a month, you get the first post of the month. And, you get a calendar navigation item again... for the previous month. (Or so it claims, I haven't the patience to test it out.) But nothing for the current month.

It's an enormous fucking mess. My hope is that sometime in the future, someone will publish a snarky book (or web site or whatever medium is in vogue at the time) of horrific web design mistakes from previous decades, and include his site.