fox@fury
Navigation in Context
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
As I constantly iterate on the design of Fury in my head, I'm influenced here and there by things I read or anecdotal experiences I have. Today's post by Phiipp Lenssen, Context, not Navigation, is having a big impact on the virtual-Fury in my head.

Most importantly, it resonates with my awareness that the experience and motivations of the everyday reader are completely different than the google visitor, and the look and feel should reflect that.

Categories were all the rage, and are de rigeur for most blogs nowadays, but they don't scale well at all. They tend to work best when the branching factor is constant, that is when there are roughly as many items in a category as there are are categories in total. Another way of putting it is, if each post is only in one category, then your number of categories should be roughly sqrt(number of posts). This doesn't scale well when you reach 2000 posts and 45 categories, with 45 posts in each category. I actually have 91 categories, because I'm inefficient, and because many posts are in multiple categories, and, well, I am a freak.

Anyhow, the article's very thought-provoking, and I'll have to see how it impacts my twin desires to further granualize and consolidate Fury's organizational structure. I should talk more about this soon. Maybe I'll even have a demo.

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aboutme

Hi, I'm Kevin Fox.
I've been blogging at Fury.com since 1998.
I can be reached at .

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pastwork

I've led design at Mozilla Labs, designed Gmail 1.0, Google Reader 2.0, FriendFeed, and a few special projects at Facebook.

©2012 Kevin Fox