I have mentioned previously, in response to a question, that I don’t like the Snap Preview plugin for blogs.
It seems that I am not alone in this. Nick Wilson has written a piece on his blog about why he can’t stand the Snap Preview and while some of the commentery is tongue in cheek, some hits the nail right on the head.
Anyone else dislike the Snap plugin (or is it just Nick and I who are grumpy, not-so-old men)?
UPDATE – I see a discussion is taking place on TechMeme about this too!
FURTHER UPDATE:
Donncha added a really cool possible solution to the Snaps Preview issue in the comments, he said:
One quick and easy solution would be to add a hosts entry for spa.snap.com pointing at 127.0.0.1 on your computer so that the Snap preview Javascript is never loaded. I haven’t tried it myself but that should work!
Hate it. And I believe WordPress.com implemented it automatically on all their blogs which explains why it popped up on loads of places I visited recently. I’m kinda surprised at WP.
That’s just crazy. I wonder were WordPress paid to do this?
Dunnoe… it would make sense if they were, but they didn’t disclose that on this announcement anyway… maybe somewhere else…?
Maybe I am old at 27 but I also dislike them. Most of the comments on my post about Snap Preview also indicated dislike.
And if you want someone more “authoritative†then Kottke doesn’t like them either; http://kottkekomments.com/index.pl/comments?post=767
Dave Winer has a good thread on this. Matt’s answer is that geeks hate it and everyone else loves it and he has the emails to prove it, that’s why it is turned on by default. I hate it, my wife loves it. Go figure.
This is not an official wordpress.com response, only my personal opinion as I had nothing to do with the Snap preview stuff.
I don’t mind them myself, but then, most of the blogs I read don’t use them but when I do come across them it’s usually because I’m about to click the link that activated the preview. It disappears when I click it so no harm done.
On the occasions when the mouse pointer accidentally hovers over a link while I’m reading then I do find it annoying but not enough to get hot and bothered about it. Maybe I’m in a good mood today!
I am surprised that the snap preview was enabled by default on wordpress.com and I won’t defend it by saying the usual guff, “Oh but the user can disable it in the backend if they want” because that’s just a cop-out.
One quick and easy solution would be to add a hosts entry for spa.snap.com pointing at 127.0.0.1 on your computer so that the Snap preview Javascript is never loaded. I haven’t tried it myself but that should work! 🙂
Actually I just checked that problem I thought of when commenting on Dave’s blog – parental controls.
I have all the kids PCs locked down where if a site does not have a “harmless” rating then the kids can’t view it until I override the block on a case by case basis.
Snap Preview circumvents this by showing previews of sites which may not be suitable for my kids. Not a huge problem as I don’t see NickJr turning it on but anything which takes control from the web-user is something I cannot be in favour of.
I have them on my blog, was giving them a trial run, i have no problem with them at first, found them useful, but if you have alot of links on your site, it can drive you mad!
I farking the thing. Its a pain in the preverbial rear-end.
What *actual* use does it have? It is too small to actually see anything useful.
And as someone mentioned when it hovers over the link “by accident” argh, it just annoys me even more.
bernard
Oops just thought of another problem – what about NSFW links that you accidentally mouse over? The first law-suit due to someone being fired should be interesting!
Have you ever noticed that snap preveiw isn’t even used on their own site – they have loads of third party endorsements with names and urls but no snap preveiw on the links?!! a contradition…
Jesus it drives me nuts
There is also a discussion at Megite .
Soble’s reply is funny; “I have been talking with the Snap folks, though, and they are working hard on answering these concerns.”
The only serious thing I think they can do is to make it an opt-in system and not an opt-out. And not some big alert going “Do you want Snap Preview on this site?” but something discreet that I never have to see. Not that that will help those who might like it but don’t know about it.
It seems to be one of those nice but flawed ideas that web-developers should move on from. Like BLINK markup.
Hey Matthew, any reason why the discussion here isn’t linked to from Megite?
Michael Heilemann recently made note of an official way to disable Snap Preview.
I sort of like it so that makes me a semi-geek (using Dilbert logic) – the basic problem is load speed. Sometimes it plain sucks. Other times it’s gorgeous. It gives me a sense of what the linked site looks lie and as they say – looking good helps.
Tom, we are investigating that. One thing we noticed that we use a different RSS feed url from your site. Hope that can fix some problem.