It started with an icon...
Dave Winer of Scripting News created the ubiquitous white-on-orange icon for website owners to link to their RSS feeds. As could be anticipated, some people didn't like the design and made their own variants. (I hacked together an ugly little blue-on-white one. I didn't use it for very long.)
Last October, Winer responded to this trend:
Please don't tweak the little white-on-orange XML icon. I'm seeing variations out there. That's not cool.
...which led to criticism and derision across the blogosphere.
Winer initially had the right idea -- standardisation of common visual elements is beneficial on the Web -- but openly discouraging variety and creativity was an ill-conceived move, and there's no avoiding the fact that from an aesthetic perspective the white-on-orange icon, well, sucks donkey biscuits. And there was another valid criticism of the popular icon, as Anil Dash eloquently stated on MetaFilter:
Having an "XML" button to announce your RSS feed is like having a big sign out front of a car dealership that says, "STEEL".
The search for a better icon was on, and it wasn't long before people began to glom on to the alternative designs offered by Antipixel. Encapsulating both usability and chic in a tiny package, the icons gained popularity and a host of imitators.
I mention all of this because the other day, I came across this site... which has (currently) 463 buttons in the same distinctive style. An RSS button now looks like this:
These buttons are getting so popular that you can now even create your own with a simple web front-end to a clever PHP script.
Maybe these icons are soon going to be as overused as the old one is, but unlike the white-on-orange xml.gif, these at least have the virtue of being aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. So, my website-owning friends, go over to gtmcknight.com and Steal These Buttons!
Not one to ignore instructions I've stolen some of the buttons myself, which you can now see on the front page if you view the site through a browser and not an aggregator. I'll be adding more in the future, but for now I'm resisting the temptation to put a shedload of them up there. Currently they each link to something, which is the way it ought to be. The W3C buttons will go off and validate this site's HTML and CSS, quite possibly causing me embarrassment in the future, while the RSS and GeoURL links do what they always did.
Yeah, so this lengthy blog entry is all about a tiny site design change. Isn't that anticlimactic?
I think these buttons work well on this site. I hope you agree. And if Dave Winer doesn't like them, he can kiss my RSS.