Much of the functionality in the latest release is good or at least inoffensive (pingbacks, cross-post posts to Twitter and Facebook, add Facebook Connect alongside OpenID for non-LJ users to log in and post comments). But one item, the ability to cross-post comments to Facebook and Twitter has caused a bit of a fuss (understatement, this is LiveJournal so toys have been ejected from perambulators with great vigour).
It seems like a dumb idea, badly implemented.
Context Why cross-post a comment out of context from the post it is commenting on (and indeed out of context of an any comments it may be in reply to, LJ having a decent threading system for comments unlike some other blogging systems)? It seems pointless.
Privacy The fact that the choice to cross-post is entirely at the hands of the commenter and ignores the privacy settings of the original post has caused the biggest fuss and rightly so. If someone posts a friends only post to their blog, then should their friends be able to share their (out of context) comments on that post with everyone on Twitter or Facebook? Well, at least you’ll find out who your real friends aren’t…
Poor User Interface The positioning of the checkboxes for cross-posting between the comments field and the comments submit button is likely to lead to accidents. And considering the context and privacy issues such accidents will be at best nonsensical and at worst deeply intrusive.
I would never have gotten beyond the context issue if someone had brought this up in a brain storm with me. The sheer pointlessness of this function means it should never have been developed, and now that people have expressed almost entirely unfavourable opinions because of the privacy and UI issues, should mean that it gets removed rather than “fixed”.
I hope that the cross-posting of comments, and only the cross-posting of comments, is removed soon, as it threatens to overshadow the other features in this release which offer useful functionality that can enrich the LiveJournal experience for users who use it as a general blogging platform rather than a private, anonymous, slash-fiction, walled garden.
BTW, this post was created in the WordPress blog on my personal site; cross-posted to LiveJournal; syndicated via RSS; a notification tweeted; and Facebook notes will pick it up from the RSS in a couple of days. Your comments and replies will only appear in the place they were made however, unless you use (on purpose or by accident) this misguided feature on the LiveJournal version of this site.
I always enjoy Peter-Paul Koch’s blog posts even though currently I’m only on the very distant edge of the mobile world (as a user I use my phone for making the occasional phone call and nothing much else, as a developer I’m dipping my toes in the world of mobile web and couldn’t care less about apps). Today’s seems to sum up the situation with Apple perfectly:
Is it a good idea for Apple to go to war against several major players and piss off developers all at the same time?
At the start of the year I was working Wicked Web in Clerkenwell, living in West Norwood and had been going out with pink_weasel for six months. We went on holiday to Boston and Tennessee. WW moved office to Old Street in the spring. I went to Las Vegas for Andy’s stag weekend.
2001
I took Lettice to Budapest for her birthday. WW started laying staff off towards the end of the year.
2002
WW went into liquidation and hence I was made redundant. I became self-employed and started freelancing for many ex-WW clients. Went to the south of France with Lettice’s family – first time I’d ever seen the Mediterranean.
2003
I spent the first part of the year working on a site for the BBC. Towards the end of the year I started doing contract work via an agency which meant that I got a large refund from the tax man, eventually. I went on a falconry day and flew a Harris Hawk. I asked Lettice to marry me.
I gave up freelancing and started work at Visit London. I started cross posting this blog to LiveJournal and joined LibraryThing and Last.FM. I moved house to larger flat, ten minutes down the road from the old one, and Lettice moved in. We got married and went on honeymoon in Canada.
2006
I learnt XSLT. Lettice also started to work at VL. I joined Flickr
2007
Relaunched visitlondon.com with a new CMS, clocking up a stupid number of days off in lieu in the process. I did jury duty. I joined Facebook. We went to Dublin and Amsterdam.
The sidebar says that there are 25 posts in November. But 5 of those are the automated weekly posts of Twitter updates. And 2, including this one, were actually written a week into December and backdated.
Not good. Worse than last year in fact. I fail at blogging.
November has arrived accompanied by wind and rain and cold (and indeed a cold). How to spend the month?
Well mostly Lettice and I will be spending it buying a house. Or trying to. The other day we took a tame civil engineer to have a look round the place we’re hoping to buy (in a sort of “look for the massive faults before paying a surveyor” kind of way) and he could only see one potential problem. Fingers crossed that it isn’t.
Like last year, I’ll be taking part in NaBloPoMo as a form of half-hearted solidarity with the people who are attempting NoNoWriMo.
And I’ll be growing a moustache. Some banter in the office on Friday has somehow led to me agreeing at the last minute to take part in Movember. Now, despite having a silly name and being an Australian import, this is a very good cause so please make a donation. I promise to only post very occasional photos of the mo’s progress.
Finally I’ll be hiding from the bad weather and watching telly, not least Doctor Who which is back for a special on the 15th.
The latest issue of Ragnarok, the journal of fantasy and science fiction wargaming, was published this week and contains the usual mix of useful and off-the-wall articles. I liked the Daleks, the moon landings and the discussion on alternative history.
Combined two stylesheets into one (originally the second stylesheet had been @imported in order to hide it from Netscape 4, those were not the good old days)
Converted the site to HTML 5, just because I can, and added some ARIA role attributes for accessibility
Pulled in the latest blog posts onto the homepage (using Magpie RSS to do so)
Added all the new sites to the navigation
Added social bookmarking links to most pages so visitors can send the page straight to Google, Facebook, LiveJournal, Delicious, Stumbleupon or Twitter
Five years ago today I made the first post on this blog. 828 posts later here we are.
The posting rate has varied enormously but averages one post every 2.2 days. It was highest when I was self employed and working from home and lowest after Facebook and Twitter started to eat up some of the shorter, quicker posts I could have made.
Around 700 of those posts have also appeared on the LiveJournal version of the blog (which generates more comments than the main version, 882 vs 392), and around 250 have appeared as notes in Facebook.
I’ve moved host once, upgraded WordPress countless times, but kept more or less the same look and feel.
I’ve learnt how to code with XSLT, JSP and jQuery. I’ve also moved house, changed job, been to Venice, Amsterdam, Vancouver and Dublin, bought a lot of dinosaurs and gotten married.
Wales have won the Grand Slam, twice. Doctor Who and Star Trek have both returned triumphantly. Tony Blair and George Bush have left the building.
It’s been a busy five years, and that’s a very true thing.
‘cos I’m a muppet who doesn’t have a development version of this blog, things will shortly get ugly as I’m going to be redoing al the templates, css and javascript on the fly.
Updates
Browser Support
As this is a personal blog support for IE6 is dropped from here on.
Supported browsers as of today will be what I have installed on this machine – IE8, Opera 9.6, Firefox 3, Safari 3.2, Chrome 2.
Support for IE7 will be added as and when I find it convenient to do so
BTW, I’m not totally a muppet – I did back up the old files before I started
Two hours later and the basics of the styling are back in place
I’m playing with the templates. I’ve modified the comments code to use the built-in WordPress comments function which means that threaded comments are now supported. As this limits me to the predefined but bounteous class names I wil need to rewrite the CSS to match.
Expect some disruption for a few days as my attention span is short and I may take a while to finish this.
Very True Mood: annoyed
Very True Music: British Sea Power - Something Wicked
Well, it wasn’t exactly an unqualified success. Including this one, I made 27 posts in November – three short of the goal. Those 27 posts were made on only 22 days – so even further from the goal of posting every day.
That said, this was my most productive month since April 2006, which is no bad thing. For the first ten months of 2008 I’d averaged 6 posts per month, so the real goal of getting me blogging more frequently was definitely achieved.
I don’t think I’ll try it again in December but maybe sometime early next year.
contemplative![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Lettice also started to work at VL. 
accomplished
nervous
annoyed