I’m going to leave the title off this post and see what happens.
Titles are a lot of pressure! I think there is a reason that the big text-based social networking sites (Mastodon, X, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, etc.) don’t have titles. Especially for short posts, the title just isn’t necessary. Just say the thing.
I remember Manton Reece talking about this (← jump link) on ShopTalk. Manton’s own blog mostly doesn’t have titles (the longer entires do).
In the show, he reminds that the RSS spec does not require titles. It’s the infrastructure of stuff built up around blogging and RSS that imparts either requirement or strong push toward having titles. For example, some RSS readers get confused or have awkward UI around a post without a title. My own favorite, Feedbin, shows the author of the post as the title if it’s missing. Eh, not great not horrible.
I would encourage any service having anything to do with RSS to support title-less entires nicely. In a lot of cases, the title just… not being there seems like it could work. Be designers!
NetNewsWire (https://netnewswire.com/) has great support for title-less entries. I use a WordPress plugin called IndieBlocks (https://indieblocks.xyz) that comes with two title-less Notes and Likes custom post types, and have a similar microblogging setup to Manton.org powered by WordPress.
I probably should write up a whole “How This Website Works” section for myself some day so I can keep track of all these little things.
NetNewsWire gave me a short (50 character?) snippet ss the title. Pretty good in my opinion.
My reader, Newsboat, just starts showing the post, where it normally shows the title, disappearing into the horizontal abyss.
I use Fluent Reader and only saw (untitled) before clicking in, but I gotta say, made it more intriguing.
Feedly gave me a short snippet as the title.
Feedly just straight up read the body
Netvibes showed the entire post without line breaks as its own title. Looked perfectly alright in the dashboard view I use.
In place of the title, Feeder shows the URL for this post (https://chris-coyier.mystagingwebsite.com/2024/03/03/11148/).
Hi Chris, you website is quite cool in design and works nice in dark mode. You designed it yourself or want to say a few words on that?
Interested to hear if you had to make any mods to your blog? I noticed it displayed fine on the main page.
It would be cool if WP supported titleless posts out of the box. Pretty sure it didn’t used to last time I tried, but that was many years ago.
I wonder how the titleless post look in the RSS feed. I don’t have a way to check that atm.
FWIW, Reeder ignores the title on display, but in the previous listing view (denoting the list of rss items) it highlights the first listed line of the first sentence as a pseudo-title, then along with a clip of the body content.
After this first untitled post, I was completely neutral about it.
But the untitled posts are becoming more and more annoying and I’m realizing now how important the titles are. With titles I could scan your page quickly. Now I have to look carefully at what I’ve already read and what’s new each time I visit (and no, the date is not sufficient). From my humble point of view, articles without titles are a bad decision…
Ref: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/first-2-words-a-signal-for-scanning/
The downside to posts with no title in a browser, of course, is that the browser tab becomes indistinguishable. For this reason, when I do “title-less” notes, I have words to the effect of “Note #12345” (where 12345 is the post ID) appear in the title tag (but not on the page itself). As Terence Eden recently observed, HTML pages require titles (even if they’re blank), so there’s no such thing as a HTML web page without a title.
Which in turn inspired me to try to create a HTML-less blogging engine, using plain text files plus RSS. And in commenting on that effort, James Doc led me to you.
Hi!
Interesting stuff!
Yeah I think a browser
<title>like “Chris Coyier — May 3, 2024” or something feels OK. I may try to work on that. I like the idea of leaving it off RSS though and kinda forcing the RSS app to deal with it elegantly. Feedbin puts the author title there and while I don’t love it the only better idea I have is appending the date.