Next!

I’m reading blogs. Lots of blogs. Every now and then I search for new blogs. To see wether they are good, I read many of the posts on the blog. Usually, after some posts, the blog is split into pages. The pages are connected by a link. This link is usually called “more posts”, “next page”, or “older entries”. On the subsequent pages, the first two options face me with a problem:

How do you call the opposite direction of “more posts”? More posts works great if you simply add posts to the page without removing the already shown entries. On the other hand, with this behaviour you can not save a bookmark to continue reading later.

The opposite of “next” is “previous”. Easy, isn’t it? But wait. Blog posts are sorted by date, newest first. So does “next” mean the next page I will want to read or is it the page that contains the next (newer) posts? You think I’m crazy since it is obvious what “next” means? Open some blogs. It’s mostly random.

Clients from Hell

Previous means: Newer posts – as stated in the tooltip

Twentythree

Previous means: older posts – note that the link on the left increases the page number!

Once you think about it, the obvious solution is the third option: Label the links “older/newer posts”. Your reader still has to know that the blog’s first page holds the newest posts but since this is the case with close to all blogs, it is unlikely to confuse.