I believe I will adopt your methodology of using ALT text to label hyperlinks instead. Snap shows an illegible graphical overview of a linked page, whereas ALT text can be tailored by content authors to tell their audience WHY a hyperlink is relevant in context.

I guess sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.

I have a usability tip for your blog: get rid of these snap popups! As I use a wheel-mouse to scroll this article I keep getting distracted by silly popups as my cursor passes over links. This ‘feature’ is very annoying to me, and makes me want to stop reading your blog.

I also found a link on Darren Rowse’s blog indicating that he’d surveyed his readers and found they disliked the Snap Preview.

Also, one reason I chose this theme was for the wide text area. I like to put screenshots in some of my posts, and particularly with that 20 Usability Tips post, I could see how the constant screenshots with the snap preview “snapping” all the time could be annoying.

I’ve started to put text in the Title field of the hyperlink dialog box instead.

Personally, I think the Snap Preview is one of those gadgets that seems cool but actually doesn’t add much value to a blog. I know I advocated for it earlier and even think I encouraged others to use it. I don’t feel strongly against it now — I just am not totally convinced enough to use it.

By the way, I read your post about the new Google Analytics enhancements and used it for some of the news on the latest Tech Writer Voices podcast.

I agree that Google Analytics’ new graphics are a level above their previous metrics graphs. I’ve noticed that Site Meter says I have a lot more hits than Google Analytics.

Speaking of Google, they recently acquired Feedburner — that’s pretty cool.

I notice you removed Snap Previews from your template a few weeks ago and wonder whether you’ll share your reason for doing so. I see you still enjoy embedding hyperlinks in your content, and if ever there were a reason to use Snap Previews that’d be it.

I still have Snap implemented on my blog but my visitors have not commented on it either way so I don’t know whether it’s neglected, appreciated, or despised.

I took advantage of a couple of related conversations on Digg to ask whether people liked my implementation and the only replies I got were negative. I don’t consider this to be an accurate representation of my readers but it’s a little alarming nonetheless.

I’d be very interested to hear how you came to decide to omit this unique functionality.