 Blog PostsFriends         | BlogOkay, Somebody Explain This ...(posted August 22, 2011)Most of my friends are aware of how perturbed I am with the new Home page, and what I consider to be the unnecessary, unwanted, despised clutter that now resides on it. There are issues about how to clear it of that clutter, and the fact that there’s no way to clear out the various comments attached to all of those notifications and Share Something posts without “dismissing” the entire thing, thereby depriving yourself of what would be a helpful reminder otherwise. At one point, in disgust, I said, “What the hell, let’s just wipe it all away. If I keep up with it, I’ll be able to keep it much more usable than that quagmire of crap that exists now.” So I started dismissing EVERYTHING. And I was able to wipe it all away … except … Regardless of what I do, I can’t delete posts made by two people: Dilly and Merc. Hey, I like both of them. They’re both nice people. But I don’t want to look at every single post each of them makes for the rest of my life. Why those two users, but no one else? (pictures being posted for this blog)  It'll Keep Me Busy, Sort Of Like Building The Great Wall Of China(posted August 19, 2011) As my friends generally know, I post a HUGE number of photos in Wireclub, over 3200 in the three years I’ve been here. In Old Wire, as the maximum limit of two hundred was reached in the Picture Gallery, I would shift pictures over into blogs, generally clearing out old pictures and making room for the addition of new ones. I would generally shift pictures over into one of four categories: “Around Napa Valley,” “Around My Place,” “Previously Posted PrintScreens,” and “Various Previously Posted Pictures.” In addition, I’ve posted many “photo essays,” blogs that featured a collection of related pictures, along with associated text. Now, New Wireclub is structured differently. Some things about it are better for an indulgent picture-poster like me. There’s no limit in how many pictures one can post in the Gallery ( which now isn’t the Picture Gallery, but rather, is “My Images.” ) And pictures can now be grouped together in “Albums.” The concept of Albums fits well with the blogs I’ve created … … except … Albums do not accommodate the inclusion of text. Pictures only, not text whatsoever. No captions. No lengthy explanation to go along with posted pictures. Just pictures. Period. Now, I could just leave the blogs where they are. But I’m not particularly happy of the way that pictures now exist within blogs. The entire thing is extremely LINEAR in a VERTICAL way. The text is WAY UP HERE, and the pictures are WAY DOWN THERE. The Gallery format - thumbnails arranged in rows - previously available to include in a blog, is now missing. It all simply doesn’t work very well for my purposes. So it kind of seems like I’m screwed. I can’t make either the blogs or picture Albums work as I’d like. But I think there’s a way. And in a way, it might work pretty well. But it’ll be a massive undertaking. What I plan to do is take all of the pictures now residing in blogs, and shift them into Albums. That’s already a huge amount of work. Nearly two hundred separate blogs to convert. Over 3000 pictures. But what about the text? I’m going to extract the text, place it in Microsoft Word documents, and then make PrintScreens of those documents, converting text into a picture which I can place into the album. I won’t be able to modify that text after doing that (at least not very easily), and the task will be staggering. But there will be one big benefit: I’ll be able to intersperse text with pictures in a way that I’ve been wishing I could for the entire time I’ve been posting photos. It won’t work EXACTLY as I’d like, where you can have both a picture and large amounts of text in the window at the same time, like a coffee table book. But I think it’ll be a workable solution. I plan to get everything prepared first, and then, in one massive project, shift it all into Albums. I anticipate that I’ll basically be sitting here for hours, creating album after album after album. Besides the massive task of actually doing this, there is one other drawback with this project, one which is quite ironic, considering the amount of whining and complaining I’ve been doing about New Wireclub, and specifically, how I despise the clutter we now have to live with on Home pages. Once I begin the process of actually creating those albums, it’s going to be flooding the Home pages of my friends. It’s going to be day after day after day of basically subjecting my friends to what will sort of amount to a clunky version of each of those albums, in their entirety, on their Home pages. I guarantee you’re going to be sick of it before I’m done. (shrugs) New Wireclub Rant #8: Blogs Are Not Dated(posted August 18, 2011) That's right. There is no place on the blog that tells when it was posted. Geoff brought up a related issue (I remember not just where). On blog pages before, there was a little list over on the left side of the page. It listed the latest ten blogs by title, and beneath that, it listed the month/year in which there were blogs, such as ... September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 ... etc. Both the "top ten" and the "month/year" list items were clickable. Those were quite practical. It's a loss that they're gone. New Wireclub Rant #7: The Black Bar ...(posted August 18, 2011)... at the top of most Wireclub pages has, of course, some "menu" selections, or whatever you call those words up there you click on to navigate around the website. The font color of those words is a dark grey. There's very little contrast between the color of that black bar, and the color of that font. When I first logged on this morning, when the sun was fairly bright in this room, I simply couldn't see anything other than the black bar. I knew there was stuff up there, but I simply couldn't see it. I just had to click around up there blindly, hoping I'd hit what I was looking for. Needless to say, that was agonizing tedium. It's night, and the lights are off. No light from anything other than the television and my computer monitor. Even with this, the contrast is annoyingly absent. I can see those words, but the contrast is still terrible compared to ... oh ... say the white "Post" on the blue Post button I'll click to post this. So that means that I'll have to either close all the blinds anytime I log on during the day, or just blindly stab at where I think the right word is up there. Does anyone else share this problem? New Wireclub Rant #6: No Captions On Pictures(posted August 18, 2011)Crap. There's no captions on pictures. The only way to provide any information about the picture is by adding it in a comment. Okay, I know how I'll deal with it for future pictures I'll post. I'll have the caption already written for each picture, and the moment the picture is posted, I'll drop the caption in as the first comment. Murphy's Law: I'll betcha anything that if more than a few comments are posted for a picture, filling in the available space, the latest comments will prevail and the earliest comments will become "hidden," only to be seen via scrolling. Thus, the caption won't be seen as what it is: a caption. Wow! I've discovered something BAD already. In old Wireclub, pictures were ordered according to when they were posted. This gives a chronological order. At one end of the string are my oldest pictures, at the other, those I posted only a few days ago. All the pictures were transfered to new Wire in the same order ... ... but ... ... newly posted pictures are going into the gallery ( now called "My Images" ) at the WRONG end of the order! So let me try to illustrate the problem this way: The pictures in the Gallery were in a consecutive order before, sort of a line, like this (01 is the oldest, 20 is the newest) : 20 15 10 05 19 14 09 04 18 13 08 03 17 12 07 02 16 11 06 01 If I added to them, it would make sense for the “age” of the pictures to follow the same order, like this: 24 18 12 06 23 17 11 05 22 16 10 04 21 15 09 03 20 14 08 02 19 13 07 01 ... or maybe something like this 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 But they get added to make the order like this: 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 21 22 23 24 25 This presents me with two very unappealing choices: ~ Live with it ~ Delete all of the pictures, and re-post them so that new pictures will fall into the right order, but in the process, lose all of the accumulated comments (some of which are several years old). That probably won't matter to many people, but it matters to me. For instance, each week I post a "Weekly Photo From My Porch." The were in the order, of course, according to how old they were. When you went through my pictures, they would get older and older, or newer and newer, depending on which direction you went in the order. Now that order is going to be messed up. Fuck … Not only that, I’ve found that in the “My Images” gallery, the side edges of many pictures have been sliced off. Fuck … Addendum: I realize that there is ONE improvement that I like: The order now is shown now in HORIZONTAL rows, rather than the vertical rows in the previous "Gallery," which I always found awkward. Another addendum: While it's still possible to include pictures in blogs, those pictures also have had the captions removed, and they're in an awkward, vertical arrangement. Before, you could see them in a group, an arrangement of "thumbnails" that could be clicked to be enlarged. Now they're a little larger, and can't be seen in that grouping. Luckily, you can still click them to enlarge the image, but the arrangement now really doesn't function nearly as well. New Wireclub Rant #5: An Informative, Though Disappointing, Exchange With Administration(posted August 18, 2011)I received a message in my Inbox from Wireclub Administrator Braden for clarification on something I'd written somewhere about the new Home page. Here is the content of our conversation: `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` Braden: I'm trying to understand your post about hiding things on the home page. You said you don't want to dismiss the item, but that is how you hide stuff, it is the replacement for the old 'x's on wire. StuckInTheSixties: Thanks for replying. I'll try again, in excruciating detail: Many of the notifications that appear on the new Home page are of value, but you don't necessarily want to ACT on that notification immediately. Example: Someone writes a blog. You know you want to read it, but NOT NOW. And you want that notification sticking around so that any time you look at the Home page, it'll still be there as a reminder to you. With the old Home page, that notification simply sat there, continuing to function as a reminder, until you either disposed of it by clicking that "X" to the right, or until it eventually got old enough to move down that list and disappear from the Home page altogether. That entire list on the old Home page essentially functioned like I’ve just described. It was very convenient. It worked really well. Let me make an analogy: As many of my friends, that chronologically arranged list of notifications was sort of our Central Station. You log on, arrive at the Home page/Central Station, look at the list of notifications, which is analogous to looking at the list of destinations in the station, and decide where to go. Will it be Geoff’s new blog, SABLES’ new pictures, or that controversial Religion Forum thread I posted on that others are also paying attention to? Then you choose, and go check that out. When you’re done, you return to Home page/Central Station, look at the list again, and head off to the next item/destination that seems interesting. It was all very concise, very efficient, and EXTREMELY easy to use. Now compare that to the new Home page: First of all, those notifications are now mixed in with all of those “Share Something” comments that people make. It’s important to understand that the notifications of what your friends are doing (blogs/pictures/Forum threads/etc) are of an entirely different nature than “Share Something” comments: ~ Notifications suggest to you that there’s something that you might want to go to and examine. ~ “Share Something” comments are essentially your friends writing something on the wall where you’ll see it. So right off the bat, we now have a mixture of these two distinctly different things, just jumbled together. And further complicating things: With the new Home page, there are COMMENTS included with both notifications and “Share Something” posts. Those COMMENTS are either of minimum value, or actually of NEGATIVE value. Here’s a real life example copied from my new Home page: ~ Notification: Geoff has a new blog post: D'oh ~ Comment attached to it: miss_lotus: hahahaha! good question, but I think for the most part a vagina makes a woman. You are just being a good friend Geoff. if you want boobies you'll just have to get implants. That will be worthwhile and amusing to look at later, but at the moment, miss lotus’ comment has almost no context to give it any meaning, and is simply cluttering up things. If I went to Geoff’s blog where I could read it, then the comment would have value. Here, it’s just junk that’s in the way. And that’s only one single comment. If I understand the workings of this new setup, if two more comments are added, they will also be visible, that the latest three comments are displayed. And if they happen to be HUGE, LONG comments, they’ll take up HUGE, LONG space on the page, with no context, no real meaning there on my Home page, just taking up space, getting in the way, and transforming utility into tedium. Not only that, but many of the comments are from “friends of friends,” people I don’t know or don’t care about. The workings of the new Home page do offer a “remedy” of sorts. We can click “Dismiss,” and the notification or Share Something comment disappears. I’ve been “Dismissing” nearly every Share Something comment. I read it, it was shared, and now it’s gone. But the notifications have far more value, functioning as a reminder of something I can come back to. So I’m reluctant to “Dismiss” those. I’m faced two undesirable choices: “Dismiss” a valuable reminder to be rid of the comments, or retain the valuable reminder, as well as the comments that have no place on my Home page. Believe me, for those of us that previously had been using the Home page for that “Central Station” way of using it, this stuff is driving us crazy. I (and I think others) see it this way: A list of notifications of our friends’ activities, such as that which was on the old Home page, is of GREAT VALUE. Diluting that list of notifications with “Share Something” comments DRAMATICALLY lessens the utility and usability of that list of notifications. POLLUTING that list of notifications with all of those comments is about the worst possible thing you could have done to the way that the old Home page worked. It’s turned something that had been easy, extremely useful and efficient, into a HUGE pain in the ass. My suggestions (which strikes me as unlikely to be utilized) : 1. Completely segregate notifications from “Share Something” comments. Put the “Share Something” comments on an entirely different page. Make the main function of the Home page as it was before: a list of the various things that your friends are involved in. 2. Don’t show ANY comments in either place unless “Show Comments” is clicked. (Allow comments to be either hidden or dimissed.) By the way, that teeny tiny little box to type into for this reply functions so badly, with the text hopping up and down, making it impossible to type, etc. that for anything longer than a few words, I automatically open a Word document page, type it there, and then copy/paste. BAD design: that teeny tiny box is WAY too small, and BAD glitch. Braden: Thanks for putting the time into explaining this, it is true the new feed operates very differently. Our goal with the new feed was to promote more conversations from the home page - and that is not what everyone wants to do on their home. We wanted to change the "timeline" style where posts get pushed down to the bottom so that active conversations stay in view, but if all you want is a timeline that is not going to work. We obviously aren't trying to piss everyone off, we can never be perfect at identifying how people use the site, I'm sorry the new design is frustrating to you. We have received a lot of great feedback in the few short days this has been online, we are committed to working as fast as we can to address the most glaring issues and I think implementing a timeline/central station style view is very possible. I will look into the problem you are having with the textbox, it is definitely oriented towards very short posts and should expand or something if you are typing a novel. 16 minutes ago StuckInTheSixties: This is a person-to-person communication, so I'll ask first: May I have your permission to blog this exchange? Braden: You may absolutely post this - and do you mind if I add you as a friend so I can reply there as well? StuckInTheSixties: Of course. `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````` So ... I have my answer. Our new Home page is what it is. If you read this blog, you know how the old Home page functioned for me, and why the new Home page doesn't. I have to live with it. Using Wireclub now is going to be like a ballet dancer wearing hip-boots. Utterly clumbsy and frustrating. Sad. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Addendum: I've found that there is a menu item (or whatever it's called) up there on that black bar: "Notifications." But it only tells you when someone has interacted with YOUR blogs, pictures, etc. It doesn't inform you of what your friends are up to otherwise. Those "notifications" only exist in that awful Home page jumble with those "Share Something" posts and all of the comments that accompanies BOTH. It's an utter mess. New Wireclub Rant #4: Login (This One Is Even Shorter)(posted August 17, 2011)There is a horribly annoying lag in nearly every situation where typing is required. It reminds me of when I used to spend time in chat rooms, and everyone would be bitching, "GAWD, I hate this lag!" New Wireclub Rant #3: Login (This One Is Short)(posted August 17, 2011)Even though the little "Remember Me" box is checked, it doesn't remember me. I must type in my full username and password each and every time I login. With my long username, and my long, complex password, the act logging in is not just tedious, and not just repetitive, but tediously repetitive. It sort of sets the tone for everything which follows. New Wireclub Rant #2: Home Page(posted August 17, 2011)What used to be a nice, neat, concise, helpful, chronological list of notifications ... -- things your friends did, such as commenting on a Forum thread you were following, writing a blog, posting a picture, etc. -- ... has now been replaced by this HUGE mess of "Share Something" posts, and the comments that accumulate for each of those "Share Something" posts. COMPARE: Old Home page: If you didn’t like any of those notifications there, you just clicked that little X to the right of it. Poof! Gone! New Home page: If you don’t like any of those “Share Something” posts, you can delete it, of course. But if you don’t like seeing those comments that are attached to each post, you can’t remove them. Thus, if someone posts … “ Hey, I wrote a new blog, called ‘SITS is a big complainer!’ ” … and you want to leave that there so you’ll be reminded of it later when you want to actually read it, you MUST also live with the clutter of those comments that accompany that post. The old Home page was of great, and was the main point from which many of us started any activity in Wireclub, and which we would return to repeatedly to see where next we wanted to go, and what we wanted to do. It was sort of the hub with connections to all of the things we have interest in. The new Home page is essentially a huge pile of clutter with either minimum value or actual NEGATIVE value. Whoever made the decision to replace the old Home page with the New, and whoever designed the new Home page to function in the way it does, should be drawn and quartered. What used to be the Central Station leading to where you want to go, the convenient launch pad enabling a user to quickly find things worthwhile to interact with ... ... is now gone, replaced by what is essentially a wall that people scrawl thoughts upon. |
