I Love The Mobile New York Times

The New York Times mobile Web site has been around for a while now, but I’ve never really appreciated it.

Mostly what I didn’t like was the pagination of the articles. I’m a reader. I like to read and having to click on the next page link three or four time to read an article was a drag.

(I’m still holding out hope that Apple will release a large format iPod touch because I’ll buy two: one for me to use as an ebook reader and one for Molly to watch videos on.)

But just tonight I realised that if you click on the single page link at the bottom of the article, the Times will remember that. The next article you read will also be served as a single page.

Woo hoo!

Update: I’m only disappointed that I can’t use the mobile interface from desktop Safari.

Online Reading Destroys Brain Cells?

While perusing the latest Political Animal posts, I ran across in which Kevin suggests that online reading might be bad for off-line reading.

It’s not just that I spend less time reading books, it’s that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I’ll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something — and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.

Now Anna routinely teases me because I’ll read, re-read, re-re-read, re-re-re — but you get the picture — books that I’ve read many times before. Some of my Terry Pratchett boks have be read dozens of times. No. Really.

Is this perhaps because my brain cells have been dumbed down to the point that I can’t follow a new story? There might be some evidence to this: whenever I buy a sequel a long time after reading the original book, I’m forced to re-read the original before reading the sequel. Otherwise I’ll never pick up the threads of the original story.

Does this happen to anyone else? Or am I alone in my reading comprehension dungeon?

Running WordPress

We’re now running WordPress version 2.0 Beta 2. I know better than to run a public Web site on Beta software, but things seem pretty stable.

However, if you run into any links that don’t work or other strange behaviours, I’d really like to know.