this girl drives a tank

content!

Joey Hess is long time Debian developer who has done lots of work on the new and improved Debian Installer and has also written a `wiki compiler' known as Ikiwiki.

As it would be an understatement to say Joey is well respected amongst his peers, I was happy to see that Linuxworld had asked him to write an article about Ikiwiki.



The site has decided however to split the article into 10 pages, and you can see, some of the `pages' have become rather terse. I really don't get why websites do this and in fact even suspect that this dissection of content might even be done by the CMS and not by a human.

Either way though, somebody at LinuxWorld must have noticed this? I don't know what the reasoning is, perhaps as the advertisements appear to be dynamic, making the user click through 10 pages will expose them to far more banners than a 3 page article? How clever, except that they have no way of calculating how many users are turned off and will make the old `mental note' (as I do sometimes) to not even bother with that site next time, or worse, not even finish reading the article.

Its a shame a really as the presentation does a disservice to an otherwise great article.

By contrast, here is a somewhat sobering article about Bisphenol A that appeared in today's Globe and Mail, the content is balanced across 4 pages and yes, there are a couple of flash advertisements, but in general the site does not get in the way (too much) of the content it is trying to present.