Blogging became popular because tools made it easy for anyone to write on the web. Type your genius into a box, hit a button and the whole world can see it. Look out, I’m doing it now.

Now we have many choices when it comes to expressing ourselves online. Yet, the strange thing is, it’s getting harder. The tools are trying to do more and, in the process, forgetting the one feature that made them useful.

Adam Mathes has a fun overview of blogging text boxes, where he shows the current interfaces of popular blogging software:

The primary purpose of blogging software is to blog. This entails the writing and publishing of short form content. Everything else is, basically, noise. Even if you don’t subscribe to a viewpoint that harsh, posting something should be the primary action of the software and treated as such. This appears to be a radical notion, given their interfaces.

The only blogging service that includes a full posting box on its main logged-in screen is Twitter. WordPress (which I use for this site) is a close second. It contains a “Quick Press” option, though it is only a tiny version of the full editor.

Times have changed significantly in the ten years (!) since Blogger was launched. I mentioned earlier that there are many new ways to create content. Similarly, there are tons of ways to digest it. The blogging ecosystem has moved on from statically-generated HTML files. In addition to sharing thoughts, bloggers care about comments, trackbacks, pings, feeds and traffic analytics. It’s a more complicated landscape with more complicated tools.

That’s no excuse, of course. Mathes is right that blogging should still be central to the software. Times will always be changing and nice-to-have features will always come along. You have to keep your eye on the original focus, stop feature creep and find a way to make your site fit into today without forgetting the entire reason you built it.

It’s not often that an account signup process on a website makes me happy. This happened today and I would love to share it with you.

I was covering MapQuest’s new directions API for ProgrammableWeb. Like most API providers, MapQuest requires developers to register. I thought I might have signed up, but the first username/password combo didn’t take. So, I decided to create a new account.

When I did, I was prompted with the following message:

“That email address has already signed up for an account. Would you like to have your password reset and your welcome letter resent?”

It’s a tiny change from the usual that makes a big difference. Most sites would simply present me with an error about an email address already being in their system. Maybe I’d be given a link to the forgot password screen. More likely I’d have to hit my browser’s back button, then find the form myself.

MapQuest has shown its developers understand the flow of interaction in that situation. It was just a login screen, but they put in that little bit of extra effort needed to make it work.

Login screens have been a common topic at Simplicity Rules:

• Adobe’s Hybrid Login/Signup Screen
• Band-Aids Only Hide Boo-Boos

I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. We made a quick swing through Victoria in Canada, which required the cruise line to collect my passport information. Like many people who find themselves with rare travel to another country, I just recently renewed my passport. That ended up being a pain using the site’s calendar-based date selection.

Using their widget, I painfully scrolled through the months. I clicked on the year and scrolled forward, three years at a time, to 2019, when my new passport will expire. It’s a Tuesday, if you were wondering.

Providing a calendar to make a date selection is useful when it’s sometime in the near future. In that case, it’s easy to scroll to a few short months away. In this situation, it’s useless.

I’d rather see month, day and year dropdown boxes. Or, even a text box that looks for the formats used by most passports (I had it in front of me to type in its info, of course). Anything other than scrolling through ten years into the future.

We’re all creating a lot of content these days. We write blog posts, share our location, store links, microblog on Twitter, and more. Others can see the latest stuff, subscribe to updates in RSS, and view individual chunks of content.

In many cases, seeing old content in context is difficult. I can look at one blog post from a year ago. I can’t get from there to the posts the author wrote immediately prior or after. Most blogs are set up with an expectation that the most recent content is the most important.

New stuff matters most, but old stuff also matters.

The problem of context becomes larger with microblogging. The timeline shrinks. “Old” becomes hours, or even minutes. Understanding a single tweet sometimes requires the context of knowing what was said in the previous tweets.

For example, say you stumbled into this message:

What is Chris talking about? Wouldn’t it help if you were able to see his previous message, which mentioned he wasn’t going to wear trousers all summer?

Flickr does this well. Every photo is shown within the context of when it was uploaded:

We see an after picture. What’s it take to see the before? A single click on the thumbnail. And if we need more context, we can click browse and be taken directly into that photo’s spot in the stream.

I understand that providing context is a secondary job for lifestreaming services, which are so focused on what’s happening right now. But as long as the content is available, it will be indexed and users will become confused if they can’t figure out where they’ve landed.

How can you provide some context on some of your site’s more buried pages?

Photo credit: Bill Jackson III

If you’re lucky enough to have a Chipotle near you, chances are you already appreciate the simplicity of their menu. There are only a few ingredients, so there are only a few options (okay, well technically there are over 60,000 different combinations, according to Chipotle ). Taco Bell, on the other hand, keeps inventing new words to describe the same few ingredients.

Dustin Curtis notices the same thing about the In-N-Out Menu.

(Yes, this is from my 2007 Ignite Portland talk, but it never made it into a post until Mike Duffy pointed me to Dustin’s)