Until LJ corrects this god-forsaken update.bml...

[wolfwings]

...you will all have to add googlewolfwings to your friends list. I don't believe I'm going to post directly to LJ again because I have almost never except for experimentation posted to LJ with anything but the web-interface, and their new web-interface severely breaks my workflow.

shatterstripes? I know what you were talking about with what Flash did every version or so now, though admitedly to a lesser extent.

Everyone else? Come, join me. Let's show LJ we mean business. Mass exodus to Google! Who needs invites? :-)

Comments

[manawolf.livejournal.com]

I'm prolly opening up a huge can of sandworms here, but what's wrong with the LJ weberface?

I'm of the personal opinion that Semagic rockzorz, but I am not a code-head and I like WYSIWYG so I can... well... click on buttons instead of typing < > alla time.

Re-write of the initial comment-talk with Otana...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...non-mangled this time...

...the old page degraded well, including for those on non-visual browsers, and was straight-forward to navigate with the keyboard alone in the non-WYSIWYG mode. These changes primarilly affected those that didn't want a 'click on buttons' editor, both those comfortable typing lots of <code> and those that... well, can't.

Things were in a very e-mail-like order if you didn't need to change the date of the post, for example, and all the various settings such as mood and music were located in the same area after the main body of the post.

This allowed you to re-read the post, and decide on the most appropriate icon, or mood, or other settings like what friends to show the post to, after you were done writing the post. The new layout distinctly breaks this workflow that some users have developed over the course of half a decade in many cases, including myself, and adds very childish prompting to the journal update page such as the heavy-handed 'Enter a subject' text inside the Subject field.

The greasemonkey plugin otana found helps, and I'll work on expanding that plugin to be more complete, but the basic fact is that the new page breaks numerous usability standards. It's nicer for me to post to BlogSpot and have LJ suck it up via the Atom feed, because that still has (for the most part) the same interface as the older LJ updater.

The newer update page also has a much smaller font enforced in the non-WYSIWYG editor than the old one, and at first did even stranger things like use a non-monospace font for the text entry box used for the body of the post, and had such a large size it caused horizontal scrollbars for numerous users. The font is still just over half the size it used to be, on my browser at least, which also causes problems posting from small-screened computers.

So why it matters 'that' much, is because LJ didn't beta-test this massive overhaul of the update page first (including having such wonderful bugs in the intial version as the 'horizontal scrollbars' glitch when they tried to post an entry that ten minutes with any Web Developer plugin would have detected) and instead shoved this change out to the live site on the same day that they announced the actual person that did the redesign had left LJ for another company.

The 'post a change for someone after they've already quit the company' bit threw a lot of people for a loop, but the actual changes caused numerous headaches due to their provable utter lack of testing before deployment. This has poisoned the well a bit in regards to this redesign, I'll admit, but it's also the first time that I'm aware of that a major change that was broken on so many levels that could be caught in ten minutes by most compentent web developers and wasn't undone relatively quickly when the surge of complaints and bug-reports rolled in until all the problems could be addressed.

The current page still suffers both from the tiny-font situation and is only about two thirds as large as it was (and they've increased the font size from the first roll-out!), and the 'Enter a subject' prompting for some reason grates on my nerves heavilly still. And I think that LJ's choice of words (definate 'no we will not undo all this, but honest, we want to work together because we love you guys and value your opinion!') sounded a bit Dilbert-ish which also re-stoked the 'Oh hell no' response instead of calming it. To be honest, I think if they hadn't put that entire paragraph in, or posted a second quick update to reassure us all, even I'd be a lot calmer.

Something else that illucian noticed was that the new design breaks still if you have large graphics in your mood-theme. Again, lack of reasonably-thought-out testing caused extensive bugs in the initial roll-out, and they've left the buggy version up over the holidays instead of switching back to the bug-free older version until they can fix the bugs.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

And for comparison, the original comment I posted to otana, and my original comment to lj_design which (unfortunately) was written in the heat of the moment when I was still at full-boil.