Mat Bowles

Vox - first impressions

OK, sent me an invite, so I thought I’d spend the evening playing around. Make that less than an hour playing around.

First impressions? It sucks. Supposedly, it’s easy to use (”turnkey” in the ad blurb, aimed exclusively at a US audience obviously). Well, maybe it is.

If you’re on a fast internet connection. To “design” your layout, you get to pick how many columns you want, where you want them, and what, pre designed theme you apply. You only get to choose their templates, no real modifications at all. But to choose them, you need to wait for all their little preview images to load. Nice and slowly.

Now, anyone note a trend on my websites recently? Note the dark background/light text, mostly white on sludge-grey? I like this colour scheme, it makes my eyes not hurt if I look at it for awhile. There are two options for white text/dark background. Tokyo by night (right…) and Shit Brown. OK, they might have different names than that but you get the picture.

So, the “design” option lets you design diddly squat. Now, if it was called “customize” or similar? At least it’d be honest, but I get to desing nothing. But I could chose a theme involving Mena Trott’s dog. Lovely.

I then tried to make a post. Now, this appears to be easy, and idiot proof. Except it’s rich text only, using clunky icons that are similar to standards but, well, look wrong.

For a “turnkey” environment, is a new user going to know that that chain link symbol is “insert link”? Perhaps. But how do I follow usability rules and title my links? I can’t? Oh, that’s nice.

I want some help composing. Is there a direct link to the compose help page anywhere? No.

Can I turn off the Rich Text editor and put my own code in? Of course not. Now, it’s turnkey, coding isn’t “easy”, in fact, a sales point is you don’t need to learn that “funny HTML”. Well, ok, most people don’t give a shit about backend coding, I’ll give you that. But isn’t it a little patronising to your userbase to assume that they all think that knowing the basics of what Sir Tim came up with to, y’know, make the internet usable is just “funny” and unneeded at all?

The “Knowledge Base” is patronising at best, annoying at worse. There are no options to turn off annoying “helpful” features (at least even Gates let’s me turn off that annoying paperclip), and, well, it looks ugly.

The ads are inobtrusive, I’ll give them that, at least on the blog pages. On the compose page? Bit bright gif down the right of the page. Bright yellow. Really needed that.

Six Apart remain rubbish. Vox is a Livejournal clone with the good bits taken out. It has plus points; the adding function is easy and intuitive, and I think I’ll get used to using the navbar on LJ a bit more once people start using it themselves a bit; simply clicking a button from the journal page is useful.

But, overall, for a company that owns a succesful platform that could easily have a turnkey interface bolted on to set up a different, competing, inferior platform is just daft. If they implemented the good bits from Vox into LJ, then they’d be spending less money and making a better product. Ah well.

Guess what I did this weekend? That’s right, I did nothing. Wonderful. I need to get some energy back and break the apathy attack

July 31st, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 2 comments

Naked boy wizards? Ouch.

*cough*

For the benefits of , and others…

So here it is: Daniel ‘Harry Potter’ Radcliffe is all set to staras Alan Strang in Equus when it comes to the West End next year.

In case you haven’t read it, we aren’t really spoling anything for you if we say that Strang’s favourite hobby is sneaking around stabbing horse’s in the eyes with big metal spikes. Not exactly quidditch is it?

There’s also a scene in the play which requires the actor playing Strang to ride a horse naked.

From , here.

Just, y’know, observing…

July 29th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 9 comments

Pledgebank stuff - Jack Straw doesn’t believe in accountability

Jack Straw is the Leader of the House of Commons. It’s him who’s responsible for rules and guidelies for MPs behaviour. Having worked out that some MPs are using their researchers to try to massage their performance stats, he’s decided that the problem is the website collating the stats, not the crappy MPs themselves.

I signed this soon after it started, but it runs out today (28th July). Go to Pledgebank, and promise to write to the man in charge of our democracy and point out that accountability is a good thing. Please?

James would like it if you don’t call him a cretin, that was a little tongue in cheek. More info here if people want it. Go sign?

Oh, thanks to all those who wrote to Dr Reid yesterday, she got the passport renewed,w hether we had an influence is likely to never be known, but, y’know…

July 28th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | no comments

LJ political writers

Right, I’m collecting new LJ friends (again). Usual criteria, people who write interesting stuff about stuff I’m interested in. Which boils down to politics, books, sci fi and general techy stuff.

But, specifically today, we’re talking British/UK politics. today linked to , there’s also , , , , , , , , and, occasionally, . That’s just from my friends list. So, who’s worth reading that I’m missing?

This is prompted by reading ’s front page and wanting to comment on every entry. I resisted, and just clicked “friend”, but, y’know…

Also, addenda - important

Spend 5 minutes of your time, ASAP, to email the Home Secretary about Rachel’s passport. Please?

July 27th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 8 comments

Free Cornwall!

Via this weeks BritBlog roundup I find this entry by . Having a glance around, he links to his website, and the story of the Free Cornish Army. Genius, sheer genius. Next time I deceide to run a revolution, I shall definately take his advice on board…

July 24th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 2 comments

Good things

Both Christy and Jo have posted lists of things that have made them smile today. So, well, it’s not a bad idea for a meme, right?

Good things

1. Via Rohim in a thread at I discover that odds are I’m not allergic to sunlight, instead I probably suffer from Photic sneeze reflex.
2. One of the two annoying obnoxious downstairs neighbours has been moved out. Unfortunately, it was the aggresive stupid one not the loud stupid one, but she’s been given a fina warning
3. My upstairs neighbour managed to find a charity shop selling traditional ice-cube making trays, so I don’t need to keep buying bags to make them any more - how insane is it to rip up plastic bags to make ice, all that packaging waste? I like the upstairs neighbour
4. The summer pressure cooker at work is almost over, now I’ve merely got to concentrate on keeping the clients happy and not costing the company too much money. assuming the heat doesn’t get to me, I may be back to a sensible modd soon
5. I have friends that are happy. I can do silly little things to make them happy without saying a word. This is good.
6. Bell’s Whiskey over ice, sometimes with lemonade. For this discovery I thank
7. I’m reading again. The last two weeks I’ve finished Fforde’s The Big Over Easy and Reynold’s Century Rain, both of which were very cool. In addition, will be pleased to read, I’ve nearly finished ’s Pedestrian Wolves, which is sick, wrong and entertaining, which is what you expect from Mr Grant, right?
8. The heat may be dying down, at least for a bit. We’ll see
9. Both and have actually made me smile by posting pictures of cute animals. I don’t do cute animals, so why did it cheer me up?

Overall, I’ve had two lazy days off doing very little. I had intended to tidy the flat, do some shopping, do some reading, etc. Meh, one out of three is ok, I’m relaxed and calm after a few stressful weeks…

July 23rd, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 8 comments

Bad marketing techniques

Hmm, glad I don’t work in US-based marketing or PR. wrote a post about bad marketing techniques (with a contrasting good technique). As a result of which, the responsible person at the PR firm got fired.

The power of the blog. Well, actually, given that it was a PR firm specifically marketing to bloggers, it’s not really evidence of the power of blogging, merely, well, evidence of incompetence.

The question is, was it “Nadine”’s incompetence, or was it the overal strategy that was flawed?

July 23rd, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 2 comments

Livejournal, icons and improvements

Firstly, on July 7th last year, someone linked to , who linked to , both were collecting quotes about the London attacks. She said “don’t friend me if you want interesting, friend him, I’m boring” or words to that effect. But, y’see, she lives in Exeter, so I friended her anyway. She was wrong about the boring. Y’know why?

Make your own icons easily

She was bored today, it seems, so she played around with some php scripts (something I still can’t get my head around, then, I’m not really trying). She made this, fairly simple icon maker. It’ll insert text, greyscale, border, etc. All the things you want from an icon, in one easy place.

If anyone has bases or simple images that make good all round icons to share, give her a shout, she’d definately appreciate it. Me? I’ve used it to finally update all my category icons, I’d been sent decent copies of the Fineas art awhileback, now I have all my categories back in non-teeny versions. I also have, um, about 15 alternates saved, witht he same text on different pics. I may have got carried away. I’m definately not going to go back and start doing other things in a few minutes. No, not me. Not at all.

Livejournal announces (belatedly) project to improve User Interface

Let’s face it, the LiveJournal userinterface and navigation system, well, sucks. After pointed me at it, I’ve got used to the new beta navigation layout, it’s a lot less ugly than Dystopia, although I still hate pop up menues. But, they’re now going to give the whole site a going over, to make it easier to use and find your way around. Don’t know about you, but I get lost, regularly, when trying to do stuff I don’t use that often. I hate certain aspects of how it works. That post is rather long, and contains the usual amount of “we don’t like change, it was good enough for me when I started” bollux. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that I will dislike some of the changes they end up making. I have no doubt that some of them will be worse than the existing method. I also suspect they’ll fix bits like that fairly quickly.

But, overall, LJ is very difficult, at times, to use, and it breaks a number of usability rules in places. So, a tentative thumbs up to the project. I will, of course, bitch about the details.

In the meantime, I have a new userpic for this post. D’you like it?

July 22nd, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | one comment

Um. Bowie does bishie?

?

Return to Labyrinth

I’m now going to go clean my eyes. Reading damages my brain. Regularly.

July 22nd, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 2 comments

I don’t, normally, talk about the weather

I have a goldfish bowl for an office. The fire exist we used to prop open was removed in the refurnishment. We ahve a flat roof. We have no ventilation.

I have a mild sunlight allergy, and, well, goth, not renowned for liking daylight anyway.

Still, the customers are happy (sort of), although some of the Spanish clients think it’s too hot. Look, if the Spanish and Turks think it’s too hot? It’s too damned hot, gottit?

I’ll, um, do the write up/instructions for the Google Bomb later in the week, the votes are in though…

July 19th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 20 comments