I don't normally think about such things, but as today is Tim Bray's birthday, I just realized that I am 41.5 today.
Imponderable for the day: does an excerpt really deserve an ellipsis if there is no more to the story?
P.S. Happy 30th birthday, Tim!
Re today's imponderable: I'd say no, but am wondering what prompted you to ask this.
I followed a link here from kottke.org on moderating weblog discussions, a lit-up topic for me. Flaming hasn't happened yet on my blog, but it has in many other venues, and I tire immensely of it. Especially because I work with images and image-flaming is even worse than text-flaming, i.e. shared digital whiteboards and bad behavior on such.
Cheers.
Happy half-birthday!
As for your imponderable. It is my conviction that excerpts don't deserve an ellipsis if the entire story is contained within the excerpt. The ellipsis implies more, when the user clicks through, there isn't more and thus bandwidth, and more importantly time has been wasted.
The ellipsis was a reference to Tim's blog entry as it appears on his front page. It is followed by an elipsis but there is nothing more to be found.
This normally wouldn't be noteworthy, but at the moment, I am looking at various sites for inspiration on how to handle things like URLs and longer entries.
More on this as it gets implemented.