Thursday, May 20, 2004

More Technotes
today's special: geeknotes 

1. Still not thrilled with the new Blogger, for all the same reasons. Its interface is clunkier; it shows less of what you want to see all at once on any given page; it requires more clicking. It's just not growing on me, but it's not just me: this is deliberately poor ergonomic design, designed to slow down and spread out the content, making the already easy tool easier to use...but at the cost of density and richness. Boo, Blogger, for kowtowing to the n00b.

2. Especially disappointed with the atom.xml feed Blogger provides, as it syndicates funny: in some odd way no way of reading the feed is able to distinguish blogtitle from blogentry, meaning the title of this entry on kinja (and, presumably, on your favorite newsreader/aggregator) will be "More Technotes 1. Still not thrilled with the new Blogg..." Trying to resyndicate it through the Blogger-recommended Feedburner doesn't help (though Feedburner itself, a sort of configuration gui for your xml, seems like a nifty tool). Anyone know how to fix this?

[Update, ten minutes later: Never mind, fixed it myself by reverting to the auto-titling function. I do prefer to handcode my titles, for flexibility's sake -- without it, using smallfont subtitles is a pain -- but I can understand how xml code needs to "see" a title separate from a post. Having to autofunction it out only seems like yet another example of Blogger being bad.]

3. Back home, my school-provided laptop (a Compaq e500 running Win98, for those who care) continues to flip out; right now, it imagines someone's holding down the shift and function keys every 5 to fifty seconds, and I have to hit it myself to get back to the interface. If I haven't been blogging much from home, it's predominantly because trying to blog on this stupid thing is a Zen exercise in self-inflicted frustration. I'd have a school technician totally wipe it but I don't have the install disks for some of the software, and also, of course, I'm a lazy bastard; packing it up to bring into work seems like so much damn trouble, we might as well have a desktop.

posted by boyhowdy | 7:49 PM |

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