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Now I will admit up front that Drudge Report is really ugly, and has a design so basic that it will still even work in Netscape 4 and IE6 easily. If you have that software available, try it for yourself; it really works.
However there is something endearing about ugly web sites. It’s generally true they load a whole lot quicker, work in just about any browser and in most instances are easier to read.
Aside from Drudge Report, I don’t think there’s really any major ugly web sites out there anymore, but you can find a whole bunch of personal ones.
Here are three examples:
Some of you upon seeing those personal sites may think, "Wow. I wish more web sites were like these, because they load so quick and are so easy to get around in."
The attractiveness of an ugly site isn’t from its look but rather its readability and ease-of-use. When you load a simple ugly site, it will work no matter what browser you’re using. IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera,
Firefox does have an "ugly switch" if you like the ugly look
In the Firefox browser, there is the ability to turn styles off on a per-website basis. Bring up the menu by pressing ALT, then click View then Page Style and select No Style.
When I bought up a PCMech article with the styles turned off, this is how it looks:
Very simple, very basic, very ugly – but sometimes that’s exactly what some people want.
Fortunately in Firefox, you can enable/disable styles at whim for whenever you feel like seeing something simpler that’s easier to read (and print!)
Should web sites scale back on design and get a little uglier for sake of speed and readability?
Would you be in favor of this? Or is it better off just dealing with what we’re given?
Post from:
Last year, Google released a feature that allowed you to block sites from appearing in your search results. After clicking a result and going back to the search results page, Google displayed a special link next to the result for blocking the entire domain.
The feature no longer seems to work: the “block” link is no longer displayed, the preferences page doesn’t mention the feature and the blocked domains still appear in Google’s results. The page that allows you to manage blocked sites is still available.
“When you’re signed in to Google, you can block a specific website from appearing in your future search results. This is a helpful option when you encounter a site that you don’t like and whose pages you want to remove from your future results. If you change your mind, you can unblock the site at any point,” explains a help center page.
Update: Google’s Matt Cutts says that this could be a temporary issue. “The right people are looking at what needs to happen to re-enable this, but it might take some time.”
After changing the snippets for Twitter accounts, Google now displays the latest headlines in the snippets for news sites. Search for [washington post], [nytimes], [le monde], [gazzetta dello sport] and you’ll find the latest news from the snippets.
Probably the best way to try the new feature is to search for [news] and check the new snippets.
It’s likely that the headlines are obtained from Google News, but not all the sites included in Google News have the new snippets.
You no longer have to use Google’s Chrome extension to hide the results from certain domains. The feature is now available at google.com and the best thing is that the list of blocked sites is saved to your Google Account.
To try this feature, make sure that you are using google.com in English. Click on a search result, then go back to the list of results. You’ll notice that there’s a new link next to the result you’ve just clicked: “block all [domain.tld] results”.
If you block an entire domain, you’ll no longer see results from that site. You’ll only notice a small box at the bottom of the search results page which informs you that you’ve blocked certain results.
There’s also a page that lets you manage your blacklist and manually block sites. “Sites will be blocked only for you, but Google may use everyone’s blocking information to improve the ranking of search results overall. You may block up to 500 sites.”
As Barry Schwarz points out, blocking sites is not a novelty: in 2005, Google tested a similar option. “If you’re in this experiment, you’ll have newfound powers. Click the ‘Remove result’ link and with one click you can drop that url from your search results. By default, it will only block that url for that particular search. If you’re really annoyed, you can click ‘More options’ and you’ll get two more choices: block this url from all future searches and the ability to block the entire host from all future searches,” explained Matt Cutts at that time. The experiment wasn’t successful, but Google partially resurrected this feature in SearchWiki: you could only hide a search result for a specific query.
I think that blocking an entire site from Google’s results is a feature that’s way too powerful for a regular user. Some might use it accidentally and find that Google’s results are suddenly less relevant. Google could add a link for explicit feedback (“Not useful?”) and use that information to personalize search results.
Here I feature four websites with the sole puposes of reviewing web URL for safety. Read more at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-quick-sites-that-let-you-check-if-links-are-safe/
which has 288 Diggs so far. Thank you for checking it out!
