RatCreature's Journal

I just reloaded my Tumblr dashboard and they moved all the things around without warning. It's quite disorienting.

So I tried to turn my Santa!Cthulhu image into a basic greeting card, but their site just doesn't work right with any of my browsers. That is in my Firefox some of their links don't aren't clickable, even though I have Flash and Javascript and everything enabled, and in Opera the links work but the OK buttons in their pop-up windows don't. And Konqueror didn't show the pop-up thingies correctly from the beginning. At first I thought, ok, the Firefox on my laptop is very old, so I tried on my desktop, which has the current Firefox, but no luck with that one either.

But I'm not easily deterred so I did manage create an account and to upload the image, finally, but then when I wanted to do the simplest product design, i.e. pick a card, put the image on the card sized so that it fits, without even any text or borders or stuff, it constantly did weird things. Like I wrangled it right, and clicked the save, but then back in the overview it had saved empty. And then when I finally managed to put an image onto a card, and made it public (or so I thought), it didn't show on the shop page, which I thought was because I got a page error in the middle and had to reload. However, it seems that was just a time delay, but they could have said that it takes time to show up.

Also, whenever I clicked the help popup to explain something I only got the general main help page. Like there would be a link "what is such-and-such" to explain a function and then I didn't get somewhere that even had the term on the page.

However, I did manage to create a Santa!Cthulhu card, and I think one can replace the country code in the zazzle URL with the one most convenient, like pick the .com ending for the US store.

I was in the mood to look at some fanart and decided to browse deviantArt, also wondering whether it might be good as another place to post my stuff. So I just went to the site, and previously I've always followed links to an artist or a picture, and I wasn't too thrilled with the site design then, but on that level it works okay. But how does anyone cope with this site design on a more general level? Or is it just me? It drives me crazy. Though I guess you get used to everything eventually, right?

Of course it could be worse. DA has at least general categories, and fanart is separate (though it would help if the individual fandoms were separated more as well but I guess it's because it's more general use, not just fandom), and there is a search engine, but I still find DA hard to use. For example I found out that the group accounts I have seen linked actually don't exist officially in the site's infrastructure. That I learned from the FAQ after I had been looking like for ten minutes or so to find a section for group galleries (I thought it might be easier to find fandoms that way), and was completely baffled. Apparently they exist unofficially through more than one person using an account somehow. At least that explains why these groups aren't more common. I expect it must be rather nightmarish from a maintenance and security standpoint for group owners to have to share the main password and not have different right levels or something like that.

Still, those of you more familiar with the site, do you recommend getting an account there? Is the function where you watch artists userfriendly? Does posting stuff there reach a different audience than LJ or is more of a wash? I mean, I'd cope with obnoxious interfaces for the potential of even a small amount of extra feedback. *g* Any opinions on the site?

Because I'm quite frustrated with the delicious redesign (now revamped without dots -- unfortunately they didn't stop there), I looked at alternative services. Only to find them even worse or just too different in purpose.

Netvouz has no tag bundles, though you can sort the bookmarks themselves into hierarchical folders, but it looked still quite promising, except that once I had imported my delicious bookmarks I found out it allows for only twenty tags per bookmark. If you have seen how I tag you see how that would never work for me. Well, at least it had a bulk deletion feature and I could clean up my truncated bookmarks easily and abandon that service.

Similarly, "Mister Wong" looked promising at first (apart from the stupid name) in that it clones delicious' tag bundles feature, and it even has a rudimentary bulk editing function to change the privacy settings and delete more than one bookmark at a time, however it only allows twelve (!?!) tags per bookmark, which is a ridiculously low number for how I use tagging. So I didn't even look further how it compares otherwise.

Simpy, which I used before, has some nice things like the NOT operator for tags or the groups feature for collaborative bookmarking (or it can be used for just for putting your bookmarks into different display sections without needing separate accounts, much like LJ comms, I guess), however that site rather sucks for browsing your bookmarks, because it lacks the tag bundling. Also for me it has performance problems in that it often is even slower to load than delicious, though at least it freezes my browser less often.

Diigo allows you to highlight text and images and put "sticky notes" on websites, which I guess is cool if you research something and want to annotate or keep quotes and important bits from a website, but it is not all that useful for my reading log type of bookmarks. It also has some bulk editing which is always nice, and group features for collaborative bookmarking. It also has something called "lists" to organize things, though I don't quite understand what it is supposed to do, the introduction texts babbles something at you about it being like folders, only not, but also like slideshows...wtf? (It doesn't sound like anything useful anyway, unless I wanted to present a sequence of websites to someone or something like that, which I don't.) It also has no tag bundling, and the browsing of an account via that account's tags is thus inconvenient and limited, much like with Simpy, especiallly with many tags.

ma.gnolia.com's site design is fairly awful, starting with their ugly blossom banner taking up about a fourth of the browser window height on my laptop screen without doing anything useful whatsoever. And I could tolerate that, but it doesn't seem to display the tags a user has at all, not even as a list, nor does it display related tags. I have no idea how people are supposed to browse their bookmarks there, why have tags and then hide them? So that one is out, even though their feature that they automatically cache a copy of the text content of the websites you bookmark is tempting, because obviously this would work around fanfic you bookmark being lost (to yourself anyway, the cached version isn't public) without having to save yourself.

Why isn't there a social bookmarking site that combines the good features, while skipping the crap? I quite liked the simple bookmark and tag display of the old del.icio.us, including the tag bundles for navigation, so it ought to be similar to that, only with bulk editing for bookmarks and tags (with UIs that don't crash), the RSS subscriptions and networking were good too, then on top of that the NOT operator for tags that Simpy has, and the group creation for several people editing one bookmark list would be cool, decent search and import/export functions of course, and the caching thing magnolia does to not loose content when it vanishes would be a nice extra.

Sigh.

I guess for now I just hope that del.icio.us will fix the worst of the mess in their new UI, so that the tag bundling stuff stops being broken, and the editing options come back as they were. (To segue into my ongoing rant once again, right now you don't have edit, share or delete links anymore for a bookmark you found by searching through your own -- I have no idea why they removed that, it doesn't make any sense. One of the obvious reasons you search through your bookmarks is to find a bookmark you want to do something with, it's not like that is some arcane non-intended usage hack or whatever).

Over time my AU recs page has grown somewhat large and unwieldy. Since an update is due soon, I've been wondering whether users would prefer to have my AU recs broken up in separate fandom pages, i.e. all fandoms with say more than twenty stories recced would get their own page, the rest would stay on a page for other fandoms in their own sections, as it is now. The main AU recs page would become an index linking to the fandom pages/sections, and have a "Recently Added" summary for the last update, like the update posts I do to my LJ, so that people wouldn't have to click further than the main page for the just latest recs. It would mean more clicking to see all recs, but smaller pages.

So which option would you prefer? After all, I'm not the one using the page.

[Poll #1198501]

In the eternal struggle to procrastinate cleaning my kitchen, I've been thinking about redesigning my website. Because starting a complicated, complete overhaul is more like actual work, I decided to just make my very bare-bones crossover recs look a bit nicer. Currently it's all in one column, first the list of fandoms linking to the sections below, then come the actual recs. I thought it might look nicer in two column, with the fandom list to the left, the recs on the right, like this. However before I commit to this, I thought I might solicit opinions, on which you like better. Thus a quick poll:
[Poll #1122802]

The Stargate Fan Awards site has to be one of the worst designed sites I've seen in a while. Having seen a bunch of buttons for that award recently I figured I might check the site out, looking whether I maybe missed some cool story. But when I went there it was impossible to navigate the site.

First, it displayed all wrong, and none of the links worked. Relatively quickly it became apparent that you can only navigate it with Javascript turned on. So okay, that sucks, but whatever, I turned it on for the site and at least the links and navigation then worked. But I couldn't figure out where I ought to go to see the list of stories from the main menu. Clicking on "categories" and it's many submenus only leads to explanations for those, clicking on "Award Areas" is similarly fruitless as it also explains the award, clicking on help explains to me at length issues of the voting process or whatever in which I have no interest since I don't intend to participate, clicking on "archives" only leads to story lists for previous years...

I mean, WTF?! I'm not usually bad at navigating websites, not even badly designed ones, but I've looked through their navigation menu and its submenus for almost ten minutes now and still couldn't find any list of nominated stories.

ETA: I have now found long lists of ineligible stories, and really, I think it says something profound about the site that it is easier (for relative values of easy) to find the lists of stories that people can't vote on than the list of nominated stories...

ETA 2: Success at last! There was a button that you could click to get to the nominee listings on the main page, only it was in an older news update from August some news entries down and thus "below the fold" on my screen so I didn't see it at first, as I hadn't scrolled down two pages to examine old updates (before utter desperation and stubbornness to beat the obnoxious site led me to it, that is), having stupidly assumed I could find the relevant things in the actual navigation area...

With each update of my recs page I run a link checker as part of the validation, using the W3C online tools. However a good number of sites, both archives and LJs, have robot exclusion rules, so I can't readily see whether the stories in question are really still there with the W3C link checker. Initially it wasn't a huge bother to check them manually, but by now it's over sixty links. Do any of you who maintain largish recs pages or other link collections have a good strategy for this or an autochecker tool working with a website that's not excluded as a robot?

I mean something like the bookmark editors in webbrowsers that go through links and then show you the broken ones, only something that would check based on a website. I assume html editors or website tools might have such a function, but I code my page simply in Emacs with the help of html and php editing modes for highlighting and such, and I have never needed any specialized programs. I tried one html editor that was bundled with my distro and had been installed automatically as part of the standard set-up (Quanta?), but it all seemed rather more complicated than I wanted to get into for just checking a bunch of links, i.e. I couldn't get the link checker function to work properly with my file at first try. I have no idea whether that was because of the file not being plain html but php mixed with html or something else, but I decided I'd really prefer something simpler.

So how do you check your links?

Some websites really put my recent worries about the look of my page on other platforms into perspective. For example I don't think it will display as black on black without anything visible at all on any kind of platform, like this page that I just visited because of a link in wereadshite does for me in three browsers I tried. I even tried highlighting all text, and then I see some tiny, tiny text in one corner that I can't read either because it's not only really tiny, the lines are also overlapping each other. There don't seem to be any links either, at least my cursor didn't change when I hovered over the page. I have no idea what it is supposed to look like, but I'm fairly certain it's not black on black... When I look at the source code it seems that there is supposed to be an image map, that I don't see, probably because the site is just too broken, I mean whoever (or whatever) coded this didn't even put in an opening or closing html-tag in this document.

Though determined to beat the odds and still be able to unearth the content I finally turned to Lynx, which gave the most viewable result, because you can follow the links of an image map. So I was able to go to the rec page itself, which was legible in Lynx however presented the same black on black look (albeit with dark blue links) in all other browsers.

Somehow this makes me feel much better about my site...

My life, okay new layouts for my pages, would be so much easier if I hadn't decided to be consequent about not mixing design and content and only position with CSS not with tables. It's not that I think CSS positioning is difficult in its concepts, and it's not like I want especially difficult designs either, or micromanage every letter position and line break. What gets to me is when I have no idea why a browser decides on rendering margins and paddings that I never put there, or ignores other margins altogether for some elements, when the design should work.

Anyway, I decided to give my blog a new layout, and after some wrangling, and careful strategizing for how to choose margins etc., it now looks basically like I want it in the three browsers I have (Mozilla, Opera and the KDE browser, all for Linux), and without resorting to voodoo-like CSS hacks too.

So now I'm curious whether it looks like it is supposed to in Windows or Mac browsers. (Well newer ones anyway, obviously it can't look good in browsers which don't support CSS positioning, but then my site isn't designed with Netscape 4 in mind, in those cases the pages are only readable, but don't look nice). So if anyone has a minute to take a look, it would be cool to have reassurance that it doesn't look broken (opinions on the layout in general are of course welcome too).

It should be fairly obvious what the intended layout is and what glitches. It's a simple two column layout with a picture on top, the whole thing is fixed width to fit the picture size and ought to be centered in the browser window, the title is supposed to be positioned in the lower right of the picture, and obviously the borders and such are supposed to be regular lines without strange gaps or shifts.