Link infestation

These days, it seems of common practice to saturate blog posts with links to tags or prior posts on the blog. This is annoying and distasteful to read.

I’m not talking about blogs that have subtle link colors, because these obviously aren’t prominent enough to be recognized so easily. I’m talking about links in posts like this at 9to5Mac and this from The Next Web. What is the point in this? To generate more page views for your blog? Stop being selfish and give the readers some slack.

It’s especially annoying when an author goes so far as to hyperlink an entire phrase in order to get the point across. (Rather ugly, isn’t it?)

And, regarding sources: why not just put them at the bottom of the page within brackets like the authors here do? It’s a lot easier to read and doesn’t make the entire post unreadable and blue.

Another example can be found here. Look at that entire second paragraph. It’s saturated with ugly orange (that’s their customized link color) text. This does provide the reader with some background information, but why on earth must we see it all in such a horrible format? Try adding a “related posts” section to the bottom of the post or something. It looks far more tidy and overall readable.

Unsophisticated text is readable. Readable is nice, yet simple is dull. You should always aim for the harmonic place between readable and simple.

On here, I try to make links and other forms of decorative text somewhat unnoticeable so that, when reading, things are not so disturbing.

Yes, this post did have quite a few links in it, but the point was to show you what it looks like. It’s ugly.