Physician Heal Thyself — Part 1

Posted by RP

December 1, 2007

Got some interesting comments a few days ago when I published my What’s Wrong With Blogs — Rant 1 piece and I do appreciate any and all comments, believe me.

But I certainly didn’t get anything that remotely addressed what I was looking for … better, more "book-like" navigation and more compact, "clickable" navigation like we enjoy with common programs such as Outlook or even moderately intelligent CMS-based web pages … like the example shown.

I don’t want a "dedicated CMS program … I’ve already wasted enough time and patience on them … WordPress is a great tool and it’s one of the most popular applications ever written. I just want to see designers using some intelligent navigation that goes a little further than "Next" and "Last". When you are reading a book or magazine you don’t have to page through page after page to find an article, you look at the table of contents and see what page the item you want is on, and go right to it.

You may have noticed a new addition to the pages here. I’m using an excellent WordPress plug-in by Lester Chan called WP-PageNavi which automatically calculates the page numbers and allows instant jumps to find your way initially and also back to something you just read.

My hat is off to Lester and others like him who dedicate a tremendous amount of time to making these add-ins. But it’s certainly not automatic, you have to extract a programming "call" to the plug-in and add it into your basic WordPress code. Not an exercise for the beginner and not fool proof … I think I have the call being made a few times too many … but for now, better too many ways to navigate than the typical WordPress designers solution of let them use a CMS if they don’t like it.

So I’ve semi-solved one of my gripes. Now to find something that let’s me list pages as simply and reliably as ancient programs like the built-in Windows Explorer that’s been a part of Windows since Windows 1.0 (yes. I was there for 1.0), and some things operate no better today than they did then … but at least they operate).

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