Participatory Design: Your Feedback on "Read More" Breaks

Thanks, everyone, for your feedback on the "Read More" post-break format I've been using on posts here over the past month. The poll showed pretty strong distaste for the links (18–7 against). Your comments offered some good reasons con and pro.

As Nick sagely reminds us, you'll never please everybody. Even on Facebook, where there are lots of people who are rallying against the site's new design, there are probably lots of people who dig it and lots of people who say, "Who cares? Design it whatever way you want; I'll still use it."

So what will I do? Recognizing that more people dislike it than like it, I'll use it less, maybe save it for the longer posts (though "longer" remains an amorphous concept!). I'd like to expand my "Hot Off the Press" sidebar menu, but the Blogger widget that makes it only allows 5 headlines; I'd prefer 10. I'd also like to bring that widget above the fold, but as you can see, I already crowd my sidebars with more junk than they really need... and I hate to crowd out the "Latest Comments" box, which I really like.

And someday when I'm rich, I'll hire Matt Paulson to do a real redesign of the whole site and put all sorts of rotating whiz-bang widgets on here!