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bostonherald.com and its one-sentence pages

By adamg on Wed, 08/08/2007 - 9:38am

Teddy Kokoros gets annoyed at the way so many Herald stories online end with a page that has just one sentence on it:

... It seems to me they could just fit the entire article on one page, but they try to spill it over to two pages a lot to increase page hits/add revenue. ...

Ed. page-break note: I work for a trade publication that also breaks its online stories into multiple pages (small example). And we ran into a similar problem as the Herald. Turns out it's fairly tricky to design an algorithm that can deal with all these cases (for example, "If the last page of a story would only have one sentence, just skip it and append that sentence to the page before"). Takes a good programmer, in fact (of which we're lucky to have a bunch), so I suspect what's going on with those annoying one-sentence pages is more an issue of a mediocre algorithm than a desire to increase revenue.

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Comments

By Ron Newman on Wed, 08/08/2007 - 10:21am.

Sometimes I make a post that is just long enough for your software to generate a "Read more". This requires the user to click and see one more sentence, or occasionally nothing more at all.

By adamg on Wed, 08/08/2007 - 10:30am.

OK, no.

The default "Read More" algorithm here is incredibly simple: Count up the number of characters, then, when it's reached, put a "Read More" break in. There are page-break modules that are supposedly more sophisticated, but installing them would take actual work.

There's also a super-sekrit codeword you could use to override the default behavior. Since you actually post articles here, I could e-mail you the word, on the provision that if you're ever captured by the enemy, you bite down on the cyanide-laced fake tooth I'll also send.

By Teddy Kokoros on Wed, 08/08/2007 - 2:33pm.

Thanks for the info. The template I use on my blog has a similar word count feature before it hits reads more. However, I falsely assumed that it would be easy for someone with more expertise to fix that on a website like the Herald.
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