I can think of some possible browser apps/extensions that might alleviate the issue. (Maybe let you click on a hyperlink and store it, along with the surrounding context, in another window, so you can store the links you wanted to remember and then read them all after the initial piece).
Middle-click on a link, or click on it while holding down the control key. This opens it in a new background tab for reading later. It neatly solves the problem. Sorry if this sounds overly blunt, but I thought everybody did this. When you see potentially interesting links, just middle-click them to queue them up for later.
(Also, regarding the links at the end of your post: please, describe what the links point at. Don’t just copy-and-paste the URLs. How are we supposed to know whether to click on them or not? This is an important part of good web writing.)
EDIT: Upon re-reading this, it still sounds a little harsh; tones of voice don’t carry over easily into text. So for middle-clicking practice and cheerful feelings, here’s a link to a cute picture of a cat looking at a duck.
This is the way that I browse, but I think it works differently for us than for others, since I know a lot of people who get lost doing this. I read link-heavy sites tab by tab, left-to-right, opening more as I go. The way Google Chrome opens tabs, this ends up being a depth-first search, and means that if I have fifty tabs open, the last one is almost always a child of the page I started on, while I might be eight levels deep in an entirely different branch.
My code-style explanation is this. When I click a link, I subconsciously allocate space for the new information. I store pointers to it, and start duck typing it, integrating it into my existing knowledge before I even have it. All of these connections are referenced by the word or word-phrase that was hyperlinked. When I get to the page, I fill in the knowledge, create back-references, clean up any dangling pointers that didn’t get addressed, and erase the tag phrase from my short term memory.
On the other hand, if I couldn’t efficiently reference content by word phrase tags, this wouldn’t work. I’d need context to remind me what the page I’m reading relates to, and why I opened it in the first place. If all pages had at the top the sentence or paragraph that contained the hyperlink that the user clicked on, this context would be apparent, and I think this is the kind of thing that Raemon is looking for. It might take some javascript-fu to get that working, but it would be a cool browser extension.
Yes I am aware of this. But by the time I get to the end of a single article, I have anywhere from seven to ten tabs open, and if I’ve taken time to read any of the linked articles it gets even more ridiculous. When you hit a certain threshold of tabs you can’t read what the titles are, and even after seeing the article it’s not necessarily obvious what was originally relevant to what.
(I admit my gut reaction is to feel a little condescended to here, but it was entirely possible, perhaps even likely, from your perspective that I really didn’t know that, and I can’t think of how you could have worded it any differently)
Middle-click on a link, or click on it while holding down the control key. This opens it in a new background tab for reading later. It neatly solves the problem. Sorry if this sounds overly blunt, but I thought everybody did this. When you see potentially interesting links, just middle-click them to queue them up for later.
(Also, regarding the links at the end of your post: please, describe what the links point at. Don’t just copy-and-paste the URLs. How are we supposed to know whether to click on them or not? This is an important part of good web writing.)
EDIT: Upon re-reading this, it still sounds a little harsh; tones of voice don’t carry over easily into text. So for middle-clicking practice and cheerful feelings, here’s a link to a cute picture of a cat looking at a duck.
This is the way that I browse, but I think it works differently for us than for others, since I know a lot of people who get lost doing this. I read link-heavy sites tab by tab, left-to-right, opening more as I go. The way Google Chrome opens tabs, this ends up being a depth-first search, and means that if I have fifty tabs open, the last one is almost always a child of the page I started on, while I might be eight levels deep in an entirely different branch.
My code-style explanation is this. When I click a link, I subconsciously allocate space for the new information. I store pointers to it, and start duck typing it, integrating it into my existing knowledge before I even have it. All of these connections are referenced by the word or word-phrase that was hyperlinked. When I get to the page, I fill in the knowledge, create back-references, clean up any dangling pointers that didn’t get addressed, and erase the tag phrase from my short term memory.
On the other hand, if I couldn’t efficiently reference content by word phrase tags, this wouldn’t work. I’d need context to remind me what the page I’m reading relates to, and why I opened it in the first place. If all pages had at the top the sentence or paragraph that contained the hyperlink that the user clicked on, this context would be apparent, and I think this is the kind of thing that Raemon is looking for. It might take some javascript-fu to get that working, but it would be a cool browser extension.
Yes I am aware of this. But by the time I get to the end of a single article, I have anywhere from seven to ten tabs open, and if I’ve taken time to read any of the linked articles it gets even more ridiculous. When you hit a certain threshold of tabs you can’t read what the titles are, and even after seeing the article it’s not necessarily obvious what was originally relevant to what.
(I admit my gut reaction is to feel a little condescended to here, but it was entirely possible, perhaps even likely, from your perspective that I really didn’t know that, and I can’t think of how you could have worded it any differently)