'no, your other left.'

So Jim’s post about scrolling up for more is even funnier than you thought.

Jim and I work at the same company, which is a strange thing to mention because we don’t actually work together — he’s Finance, I’m Ops — but that’s how I know Jim. He came up to me one day and told me sotto voce that he understood I had a blog. One mixes weblogs and work very carefully.

Quick aside: some time later I heard him use ‘kitbashed’ to refer to a spreadsheet, a term which was greeted with some skepticism from our co-workers. I backed him up and assured them that not only was it a valid term, but that they were the odd ones for not knowing it. I mean, who doesn’t know about kitbashes?

Unfortunately, I may have used some or all of the following phrases in my defense which probably didn’t help either: Star Trek, Wolf 359, Best of Both Worlds, Dan Curry. I had the best intentions?

So, because Jim and I talk about anything but work at work (Battlestar Galactica, BitTorrent, Firefox, spy blimps), one day he asked me why my site is backwards from everyone else’s. There was a reason, of course — since the posts are anchored on monthly pages, it makes more sense to order those pages in forward chronological order. That way, you can start at a given point and read forward. (And if I was going to order the months that way, I may as well put the category pages in that order too.) If you wanted the latest entry, you could jump to it directly and then work your way up to see what came before it.

It makes sense, honest.

Jim doggedly pursued my reasoning and pointed out that on most pages (of any sort) you read down, not up, and that on a weblog you want to see the new stuff first. I persisted that when reading large numbers of posts, or posts spread out over long periods of time (as my infrequent readers often do), it’s easier to start at a given point and read forwards, down the page, month after month. Reverse chronology would mean they’d start at the end of a month and go down to the beginning, which spoils the flow of the story. C’mon - you already know what happens next!

Obviously, I thought Jim had a point, as that night I added the most recent entries — in reverse order — to the index. But the month and category pages I left alone, because it makes sense to me that way. (The category pages lasted until I tried to find something new in the Home Network category and I had to wait for the whole page to load. I flipped the order around without too much regret after that.) So even though I conceeded the point, you still have to scroll up to see more on this site.

And that’s why Jim’s post is even funnier than you thought.