22 Apr 2004 | Steven Garrity said...

Or maybe it is "best view with a Cinema Display"

22 Apr 2004 | RS said...

That's possible.. but I'm not sure because the first "extras" column -- External Links -- is neatly cut in half on 1024x768. And those of us with high-res monitors and Macs tend not to keep our browsers at full width.

22 Apr 2004 | Paul said...

I like the "Narrow Page" link in the left column, which *does* collapse all of that content onto the page. Both formats work really well - good find, Ryan.

22 Apr 2004 | Charbel said...

I have to say this is the only one horizontally scrolling site I have seen that works effectively....in fact, I think it is done quite well, in such a way that automatically makes the reader's eyes notice that there is more content to the left...And the columns being narrow works very well b/c it keeps the reader reading top to bottom quickly, which is what we are all used to.

22 Apr 2004 | Chris from Scottsdale said...

I like how when I mouse over those links columns the links sort of "activate" and become a different color. Nice touch. Very cool site.

22 Apr 2004 | Paul Ford said...

One thing to note--side scrolling doesn't work for carpal tunnel sufferers; it's a real problem. I got a lot of complaints about it (thus the "narrow page" function). Also, IE side-scrolls slowly, pixel-at-a-time, which makes it necessary to use the mouse to move to the content on the right--a drag for people who are used to paging through content with cursor keys and the space bar.

So, while it works for a personal site, it's probably not anything I could recommend to my clients (which is too bad, as it's great to have some extra room on the page).

22 Apr 2004 | Josh said...

And how about the incredible awesomeness of the entire Ftrain semantic web concept? I always think to myself: If only I could make my personal site like Paul Ford's, I would be enthusiastic about having one.

Are there any out-of-the-box ways to even approximate something like Paul's site?

22 Apr 2004 | MrAnonymous said...

Like RS, the external links were cut in half for me, which was annoying. And I don't like horizontal scrolling at all.

23 Apr 2004 | Michel said...

Are you all being serious about this? Horizontal scrolling is bad per se, and I don't see a good use here. Besides, the link discovery trick is pointless and delays the access to whatever you want to find.

What amazes me the most is that all the comments go in the line of *incredible awesomeness*, *nice touch* and *Good find, Ryan*.

23 Apr 2004 | Paul said...

What amazes me the most is that all the comments go in the line of *incredible awesomeness*, *nice touch* and *Good find, Ryan*.

Why does a positive comment that disagrees with your opinion "amaze" you? Why condesend by asking if we're all "serious" about our praise?

You don't have to agree with anyone, of course, but there's no reason to put others down.

23 Apr 2004 | Don Schenck said...

Horizontal scrolling is a virus that needs to go away real fast.

Case in point: I went to ftrain and looked around and never saw the horizontal aspect of it. And I'm a certified geek of over 24 years.

Different isn't necessarily good. If it were, then Carrot Top would be a good comedian and the Renault Fuego would have been a best seller.

Me? I'm different.

23 Apr 2004 | Paul Ford said...

All right now. First, the point of the horizontal layout is that all the content over to the right CAN be safely ignored by anyone coming into the site, and only appears on the home page. No big deal if no one reads it.

Some people like the horizontal scrolling; others loathe it. The button that says "Narrow Page" shrinks the page and sets a cookie so that the page is always narrowed on return. This avoids the "one true design, one right way for all" problem. It depends on how they read the web, their browser, and their settings. So...you make your choice, and you're done. Eventually I'll make that button more "buttonish."

Granted, you'd need to be a regular reader to care about all that, but that's who the site is for.

And yep, the link logic should be reversed: they should be turned on by default, and then turned off by user preference. (If you click "show links," it sets a cookie so that they're always on throughout the site in perpetuity.)

Personally, I think both the "that's amazingly awesome" and "what shite" comments are overreaction. It doesn't even parse as XHTML yet. It's a path, a personal experiment--a proposed solution to the endlessly scrolling front page, which I personally find to be harder to read. I want to do a fly-out menu option next.

The interface needs work, but an awful lot of people really like it and are glad to see something new. A few hate it. How that holds up over time will become apparent as I keep working on it.

23 Apr 2004 | Don Schenck said...

I admit: I made a mistake.

I *DID* WAY over react.

Please accept my apology.

Seriously.

Thanks,

-- Don

23 Apr 2004 | Jason Wall said...

My roomate once used the horizontal scroll effect on his website. In his version, he would add articles, letting the last article move over creating this weird kind of horizontal archive.

Horizontal scrolling isn't common, and thus mostly ignored by people. But the truth is, if just plain refreshing to see something different, that is, if you're a long time web user.

Me, I surf between 5-6 hours a day, 5 days a week, and its rare to see somethign truly unique. Paul has a special circumstance with FTrain, in that the site is typically esoteric in nature. If you read FTrain with any regularity at all, you come to expect that Paul Ford is simply an eccentric web designer who is forced by society to vent such eccentricities in his own space...

Then again... I guess that's what most blogs are for anyway. :)

On a completely unrelated note, since I can't currently blog on my own site (due to vast internal restructuring), I've been reading Frankenstein and I'm digging that old time english.

23 Apr 2004 | Michel said...

Paul:

As I am a native Spanish speaker, I might not get the right meaning from every word and every sentence in English. Furthermore, what I say can be misunderstood by anyone but me. That's a shame.

My question was full of truth; my amazement was full of irony.

23 Apr 2004 | Allan W. said...

Regarding the side-scrolling: Something that might please the Mouse-Clicking People might be adding some functional buttons or links that scrolled (jumped) the page, say, a columns' width, or 200px. This would give people an alternate way to navigate the fat page, and hint that "there's content over thar! >>".

That, or buy everyone one of these. =)

24 Apr 2004 | Robb Beal said...

Speaking of which...

Does anyone know of any html renderers that support paged media *on the screen*? (I've seen Opera's Show stuff.)

In my horizontal layout experiments, I've had to resort to creating ridiculously wide wrapper divs and rely on javascript to work around the differences in the way browsers scroll to anchors.

25 Apr 2004 | Tom said...

I like the site design overall and I don't have a huge problem scrolling sideways (I use the hold down middle mouse button and drag method in IE) but for me having the horizonal scrollbar at the bottom looks ugly.

20 Jan 2005 | lolita said...

Hello folks nice blog youre running

30 Jan 2005 | compatelius said...

bocigalingus must be something funny.