What Microchunking Doesn't Mean
Microchunking means taking an object and reducing it to its smallest usable part.
It doesn't mean reducing it to something smaller than is usable.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the magazine industry's habit of taking an online story and breaking it into multiple pages. It forces you to click at the bottom of the page to get to see the next page, thereby generating more pageviews.
Whenever I link to a magazine story, I click on the "print format" link to get a full page of the story and link to that.
That's as microchunk as I want it.
I couldn't agree with you more. This is high on my personal pet peeve list.
Posted by: Dom | November 29, 2005 at 02:48 PM
Also I often want to copy the whole article and paste it into an email. The "print format" link helps me do that and often omits cruft like ads and images I don't want.
Posted by: snoozer | November 29, 2005 at 03:15 PM
I fully agree with you on this. Also some pages have annoying ads that come up on every 2nd,3rd and 4th pages that covers the whole page and we have to click [x] each time.
I didnt think about Print Page option. Shall definitely use that now on :).
Jay
Posted by: Jay | November 29, 2005 at 03:46 PM
Couldn't agree more, this is also a pain if there is NO print button.
I'm on the road quite a bit right now so I use ReadingBar (from www.readplease.com) to create mp3's of (long) pages I need/want to read but don't have the time. If the article is broken up, I have to create multiple files which I ALSO don't have time for.
Posted by: A Wilhem | November 29, 2005 at 04:24 PM
Fred, a very handy GreaseMonkey script will take care of that pesky problem at nyt.com.
It overwrites the links to always be the Printer friendly ones. Cool!
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/782
CM
Posted by: Chris Marino | November 29, 2005 at 05:28 PM