A quick note about some tweaks I made to the site.

Updates To FriedReads. Send Snacks (And Feedback).

A quick, informal note about some tweaks I made to the site. Grab a coffee; this one's a bit meta.

Hey everyone.

Hope you all managed to find a bit of quiet in the holiday chaos. I got a little stir-crazy myself. You know that feeling, right? When the house is too quiet and your brain starts looking for a problem to solve? Mine decided the problem was... this very website.

So, I did something I almost never do: I opened up the code editor and started poking around. I figured I'd give you a heads-up on what I've been tinkering with. No big philosophical rants today—just a bit of updating.

The Pagination Problem (Or, Why I Hate My Past Self)

Let's start with the news page. The old navigation was, in hindsight, a special kind of torture I designed for you. It had two buttons: Previous and Next. That was it.

If you landed on page 1 and wanted to see something from page 14, your only option was to click 'Next' thirteen times in a row. It was like a digital pilgrimage. I have no defense for this. I can only plead temporary insanity, likely brought on by a bad batch of code. Well, I didn’t think I was going to write over 80 articles, so I never thought it would get to that high of a number, but here we are.

I finally fixed it. Now you can:

• Type a page number straight into a little box. Revolutionary, I know.
• Click on a proper set of numbered buttons that actually show you where you are.

  It took me an entire afternoon. The JavaScript fought me every step of the way. I won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory celebrated with cold pizza.

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Building a Better Rabbit Hole

Here's a new thing I'm excited about: when you finish reading an article now, you won't just hit a dead end.

I've added a little section at the bottom called "Same in Category." It's supposed to find a few other articles in the same vein and link them there. Read about the bank robber who threw a Christmas party? Maybe it'll suggest the piece on the foul-mouthed parrots. The goal is to keep you falling down a FriedReads-shaped rabbit hole instead of sending you back out into the cold, harsh internet.

At least, that's the theory. I really hope it works.

The Share Buttons (A Test of Faith)

You'll also now see those little icons to share an article on Twitter, Facebook, and whatnot.

I have to be honest: I'm about 70% sure they function. My testing process was not rigorous. I clicked one, a new tab opened with what looked like the correct link, and I immediately closed it in a fit of social anxiety. Seems promising!

If you try to share something and the button instead plays a MIDI version of "Never Gonna Give You Up" or just emails the article's HTML to your boss, please, for the love of all that is good, tell me. You can hit me up on Twitter (@Allen_Fried) or use the (contact page). Feedback is genuinely welcome, especially the "hey, this is broken" kind.

A Quick Note on How This All Works (It's Miracle It Does)

I feel like I should remind you—FriedReads isn't running on WordPress or Squarespace or anything normal. It's a coded stack site I built myself from the ground up. This means every new feature is a bit of an adventure. I'm not a professional developer; I'm just a guy with a problem who knows how to Google "how to fix [insert catastrophic error here]."

So, these updates? They're my homemade fixes. They might have quirks.

That's about it for now. I'll be back soon with the usual nonsense. In the meantime, if you spot anything wonky or have a thought, feel free to shout. And if you're sending snacks, I'm partial to salt and vinegar chips.

One Last Thing Before I Go...

It just hit me, typing this out, that we're wrapping this whole weird year up in a matter of days. Wild, isn't it? This little website felt like a maybe-I'll-stick-with-it project back in January, and now here we are.

I'm planning to put out one more proper article on the very last day of 2025. Something to close the book on this chapter, I guess. Not a review of the year's horrors—we've all lived through that, but something else. I hope it lands right.

Until then, thanks for reading this, and everything else. It means more than my janky code can probably express.

Cheers, Allen

Just trying to make the digital plumbing work,
FriedReads.com | @Allen_Fried