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

[degaetus.livejournal.com]

Naw. I don't even know what you're talking about now. I've had no problems using their new interface.

[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.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

I'll take one of those.

[tothwolf.livejournal.com]

I'm not big on any sort of web/text interface so I've been using a 3rd party client since my first post.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Never had a need to use a third-party client. Hell, been using the weberface since 2001 when I first joined, even though I tried numerous third-party clients over time. None of them were as useful as the 'flat, plain interface' weberface to me, but I'm comfortable typing HTML code on the fly for example.

So now, in effect, I'm using BlogSpot as my third-party client.

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.

[otana.livejournal.com]

I am going to keep my opinion to myself.

Well... s'just avoiding repeating yourself, I believe.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

You already made it clear that you disagree with the reasons I have, in particular thinking I should just download plugins or a third-party posting tool when I've been quite happy with their non-WYSIWYG weberface for posting for over half a decade now, especially when without my laptop at a work site and I need to post a comment, or at a friend's house where I may not have Firefox or anything else available. For a nomadic individual, or one not always guaranteed full rights on whatever computer they may have access to, the older non-WYSIWYG weberface was easier to use than the newer non-WYSIWYG one.

You've also said that you don't think any of my points are valid reasons to request they undo their changes until they can correct the errors FIRST, instead of promising to fix them but leaving the broken (compared to the old version) page up in the mean time, unless I've misunderstood your brief reply to my comment?

Re: Well... s'just avoiding repeating yourself, I believe.

[otana.livejournal.com]

What I disagree with is your belief that the page is fundamentally broken. It works just fine for me and any number of other LJ users that are not complaining about it. I also do not see the problem with downloading a client (not necessarily WYSIWYG; Deepest Sender for example can easily be configured as an HTML entry client), and that "because I've never had to before" is not particularly a convincing argument against that.

It is your choice what you do, I just think it smacks very much of "I'm taking my ball and going home".

Re: Well... s'just avoiding repeating yourself, I believe.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

It's not 'fundamentally' broken, but is broken enough it shouldn't be left on the production environment until several of the issues are addressed. There is existing infrastructure (added however recently) to allow users to opt in to beta-testing features, and let them switch said features on and off en-masse for testing.

A lot of my complaints really boil down to Fitts' law and Accessibility concerns, I'll admit. Not many web designers even understand the former, and the latter often only gets passing investigation, and in this case I believe the redesign is a huge step back in both categories which is why I'm so annoyed.

And when you're paying for a service (Hi! Paid Member here. =^.^=) and suddenly that service makes a change you find distasteful, what other choice do you have than to 'take your ball and go home' and let the service-provider know why you did so?

[mira-fastfire.livejournal.com]

Hey youuuuu.

Remember the DS you gave to me? I'm not using it anymore (don't have time to play video games) and was going to give it to Otana (who was needing one and thinking of buying one anyways) -- but I wanted to let you know where it was going.

Is that alright with you?

*waves!*

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's fine. =^.^= I actually got another DS (the Lite model) as a gift recently, and was planning on getting a little flash-memory adapter for it so I can use it as a PDA of all things. =^.^=

BTW, I'm more-or-less 'stationary' for the time being until FC it looks like, and up in the bay area, so care to meet up for lunch or another meal some time?

Re: *waves!*

[mira-fastfire.livejournal.com]

ohhhh.

Lemme talk with Marcie, and I'll get back to you. Okay? :)

BTW, I still have one of your shirts. 'twill be a good opportunity to return it. :)

Re: *waves!*

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

'Kay! No rush, just lemme know. :-)

[jessica-ingmann.livejournal.com]

Why no' jus' use a damned third-party entry-postin' clien', ya big baby? Jesus Christ onna cracker, man... XD

Simple.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

About halt the time I'm not using my own computer to post, and many of the computers I'm likely to 'borrow time' on are very archaic, and will often be office computers I can't install a client on, and some of them often don't even have USB ports or disable the USB ports so I can't just bring a USB key with a client pre-loaded.

I've used the web interface for over five years now. I've loved it. The new version I find unusable by comparison, so I've reverted to using the closest web interface to the old version that I can (which happens to be Google's Blogger interface) and set up an RSS feed to pull those posts into LiveJournal.

I prefer LiveJournal's overall architecture, but in effect this is me using a third-party entry-posting client. Blogger. And bitching about having to do so when I was very happy with the web-interface posting system for half a decade until now.

It's Trapa

[(Anonymous)]

Hey can you get in touch with me? I think i have a programming job for you.
(non-paying, don't get your hopes up)