Comments on: 3 Reasons Why Snap Preview is Ruining Your Blog, and Hurting Your Readership

By: home repairs

home repairs — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:09:04 +0000

carpentry is art gifted by god. it really needs lot of hard work and accuracy. i can do few such carpentry of my own for my house and end with good results.

By: ???????

??????? — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:58:26 +0000

Thank God for that, I thought it was just me.

By: ??????

?????? — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:17:43 +0000

I found one useful way to use Snap Preview – for Amazon product links. In the pop-up window you see the details of the product and text is readable. I left Snap Preview for my links exchange page so that visitors can get some impression of the websites listed. Otherwise I agree that it is not a good idea to use it anywhere – just for information that can be readable in the pop-up window.

By: cocodf

cocodf — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:20:45 +0000

Great quote about magpies in a sparkly things factory!
I have found the Snap preview to be annoying also. Since I don’t want to criticize widget developers in general, all I can say is that I hope they are able to tune it to be useful without being intrusive

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:41:43 +0000

Snap is absolute crap.

I’ve been avoiding Live Journal etc since it arrived.

It’s a pop up, dress it up how you want but it’s still an UNWANTED pop up – and I don’t want pop ups thankyou.

Anyone who hates it I suggest you go here

http://spacecowb0y.livejournal.com/281574.html?thread=174054

and disable it.

I use IE7Pro which I found through that Live Journal post linked above and have entered all the various urls they’re using to try and inflict their crap on everyone.

Now I can read WordPress and Live Journal without hitting the back button because of Snap.

By: Palestine Students Forum

Palestine Students Forum — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:07:35 +0000

I tried to OPT-OUT of your damn Snap Preview bullsh*t using the disable link on your page. It doesn’t work. I have now added snap.com & performancing.com permanently to my hosts file redirecting to NULL. I guess that I will have to wait for some sort of adblock extension for IE7 to not have to use these extreme measures. Your “technology” offers NO advantange or wanted feature AT ALL. Any website that intentionally persists in its use (on any machine I happen to use/own) will be a site that I don’t return to..
Relay that is ??????????????????????
Palestine Students Forum

By: ??????

?????? — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:21:16 +0000

thanks ??????? ????? - ????? - ????? - ??? - ??? ????? - ??? ????? - ??? ????? - ????? ? ????? - ????? ??????? ??????? - ??? ???? ??????

By: ????

???? — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:12:52 +0000

By: enars

enars — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:29:53 +0000

By: Jen Sardam

Jen Sardam — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:57:10 +0000

I keep a personal blog and came across Snap Preview on other blogs and had the mindset of ‘that’s cool. Others have it on their blogs, so I’ll add it.’ The old bandwagon effect, I guess. Great points though. I’m removing this as of today.

I also use Jiglu, which is starting to get on my nerves. It seems to just pick, at random, what it deems to be keywords in my blog; and it’s nothing really more than another annoyance.

Thanks for bringing this to light!

By: cin1977

cin1977 — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 02:42:16 +0000

I found that it’s just not worth the trouble and buys very little for the readers.

By: Marcel Pamphile

Marcel Pamphile — Tue, 08 May 2007 07:57:13 +0000

Well I am sure that Adsense Click through percentages are higher on sites that use Snap preview. Why ? well most normal links become unappealing.

By: miked

miked — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:06:10 +0000

One person mentioned that all widgets slow down the page load – but this isn’t technically correct. There are a couple ways for a widget developer to delay rendering until after the page is loaded – similar to the way images load after the page is downloaded. I think modern browsers grab images on the fly so the display is faster, but its a similar idea. The trick is for the developer to care enough and be clever enough to do it right. For example, the widget I implemented at Others Online (which is very useful widget for bloggers in general – check it out) draws a simple grey frame then continues with the drawing of profiles after the page is loaded.

By: James Burns

James Burns — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:14:16 +0000

As a beginner to blogging, I am trying a variety of things in order to learn about them. I was encouraged to try Word Press and I really liked it until I was bombarded by what I believed to be some sort of third party heckling and annoyances. Apparently they had to do with insisting that I try “snap” – (I don’t recall exactly, except that it seemed to want to interact with flickr?)- so I “snapped” and quit posting to my Word Press blog until I was willing to take the time to try to figure out if I was doing something wrong due to my naive or uninformed beginner state. For those who are more advanced, it may come as a surprise as to how easily someone can be put off by features they don’t understand. I use examples with steps that I am able to follow in order to successfully learn about new things. I hope that I have posted this correctly as a comment.

By: Richard Spees

Richard Spees — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:06:42 +0000

Jason, I have my blog through wordpress.com, and this past weekend, my blog started having problems. My page would appear to load, but the Safari status bar would indicate “completed 23 of 28 or some other set of numbers, and sometimes my header image would not load. In Firefox, the page would apparently load, but in the status bar, it would say spa.snap.com, and again, sometimes my header would not load. I had several friend who emailed me telling me they were experiencing the same problem when trying to view my blog. I tried several other wordpress blogs and found problems on some of them as well.

After a little googling, and reading this post on performancing.com, I decided to try disabling spa on my site, and after i did, all of my problems went away. As a test, I re-enabled spa, and the problems came back.

I do not know whether the problem is with the wordpress implementation of spa, or whether it is with spa itself, but at least for now, my blog is a no-spa zone. I may try enabling spa again in a few weeks or so, but I’ll make that decision when the time comes.

By: Richard Spees

Richard Spees — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:40:30 +0000

I recently started blogging, and was having all kinds of problems with my blog. My header picture would not load, or the old header picture would load. In addition, whenever I went to my blog, Safari would appear as if it had loaded my entire page, but on the status bar, it would indicate “http://blah.blah.blah completed 23 of 28″, or 26 of 31. Firefox would also appear to have loaded the entire page as well, but in the lower left hand corner of the window, it would say spa.snap.com. After a little searching, and reading this post, I decided to turn snap off to see if it would help, and all the problems went away. My page loads faster, the image loads every time, and the status bar is clean after the load.

By: glenn

glenn — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 17:02:20 +0000

By: Micha? Stempie?

Micha? Stempie? — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 02:28:12 +0000

I totally agree

By: Zx.MYS

Zx.MYS — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 18:38:10 +0000

I admit it is useless,but I’ll still use it.

By: judyb

judyb — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 13:02:48 +0000

sorry, double post

By: Hanford

Hanford — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 12:55:29 +0000

The Bling issue:

Many people’s brains process information differently than you do. While you may have no problem with a text link, there are people who brain tends to process information visually. These are people who remember faces better than names, draw diagrams rather than take notes, and prefer “learn by doing” rather than “learn by reading”. SPA could really help those people out more than it helps out you, especially when a site has a lot of links, or the same page is linked to in many places. That doesn’t make the other usability issues of SPA any less relevant. It’s just that just because you don’t find the thumbnail image useful it doesn’t mean that other’s don’t. It’s quite possibly not “just bling” to everyone, in other words.

Here’s a bit more on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_style

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 07:44:09 +0000

Yes you can disable it. Everyone keeps pointing that out. But millions of users out there shouldn’t have to waste time and effort figuring this out. Opt-out always imposes a cost on the user. So I suggest, for those web/blog masters out there that still think this gadget is a good idea, to make it opt in, a setting somewhere, for those users desperate to turn it on. Care to keep track of how many will actually voluntarily want this?

By: MikeEast

MikeEast — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:34:35 +0000

Finally we can vote to determine where we all stand in this question:

http://www.digg.com/design/Do_you_like_Snap_Preview_Anywhere

By: justkate

justkate — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 08:01:10 +0000

Thank God for that, I thought it was just me.

By: debng

debng — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 04:27:06 +0000

I thought it would benefit my readers, but it annoyed them more than anything else. They voted overwhelmingly against SPA. Oh well…lesson learned.