Sign that your news post title is too long, even if you are John Gruber and are doing it for effect

Dear [Mr Gruber](http://daringfireball.net/2007/12/fastcompany): I know you are doing this stupidly long title not because you don’t know how to make short ones, but rather because you think it’s funny to have such a long title. Also, you put some of the basic points raised against articles like that right in the title, to show how serious you are about them. So in a sense, it cannot be too long. However, when NetNewsWire truncates the title while showingit, then I think it’s save to say something is wrong.

![NetNewsWire says: ‘Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies, Fabrications, and Exaggerations Point-by-Point, Despite the Fact That No Matter How Egregious the In’](http://ferroequinologist.de/artikel/longtitle_nnw.png)

For comparison:

![Daring Fireball says ‘Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies, Fabrications, and Exaggerations Point-by-Point, Despite the Fact That No Matter How Egregious the Inaccuracies / Fabrications / Exaggerations, Such Pieces Inevitably Lead to Accusations That I’m Some Sort of Knee-Jerk Shill Who Rails Against Anything ‘Anti-Apple’ Simply for the Sake of Defending Apple, and if I Love Apple So Much Why Don’t I Just Marry Them?’](http://ferroequinologist.de/artikel/longtitle_df.png)

On a broader note: I’d wish if [Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net/) and, for that matter, the [Macalope](http://blogs.cnet.com/8300-13509_1-20.html) (who said he’d [have liked to do this one if DF hadn’t been first](http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13509_1-9835888-20.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheMacalope:AnAppleblog)) would just drop it. I mean, you can see from the title that the article is crap by an untalented writer. They are not adding value to the internet if you point out it’s flaws. At best, they’ll give it a few free clicks it would never have gotten if they hadn’t posted a link there. I love everything else the two sites do, but I never found the meaning of this kind of post.

It’s as if someone made a website about trains in video games. People either already know it’s crap, or they don’t care anyway, so there’s no point in making such a site. [Oh, wait…](http://trainsingames.com/)

Written on December 20th, 2007 at 08:17 pm

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