matt.wronka.org

Who'da thunk it:


Yep, I'm actually logged into the bane of webloggers, the '00s version of the '90s personal web page with a bad neon color-scheme and starfield background. So the site is still missing many normal features, such as trackbacks and pings, but hey, it's not like I'm using it to blog!

In fact, I'm not really sure what I'm using it for. I've added all my syndicated feeds from its users to it, for whatever reason. I'm really just fooling around with it right now.

Some comments about the interface of LiveJournal are called for. It sucks. It sucked when I first went crawling through the site almost five years ago, and it sucked three years ago. It's really pretty bad, for such a heavily used site, and Six-Apart has not seemed to have changed much. Location of options and features is not intuitive.

They often have a tool-bar-style menu which is a centered line of very-small images. This toolbar is also pretty silly/dumb. It does not indicate whether someone is already a 'friend' or not--you can add anyone as a friend, it will even ask if you want to add someone already added--comeon, even god awful social networking sites like Orkut got this right (the next page is smarter--that's another thing, it often takes multiple pages to do something that should only take one). I added myself as a friend--I don't know what purpose this serves. Finally, on the topic of 'friends', there are no levels of friendsip or association--it's purely directed binary relationships.

I'm finding that I frequently have to use the 'back' button on my browser. I'm hitting pages with no links to anywhere else, I'm hitting pages that don't look like they're really thought about (such as User has no journal here as the entire text sent to me--why isn't there a link elsewhere? Why isn't this in the standard template? Why is there no standard template. Depending on where I go, the layout changes, drastically. And I don't just mean between different user's journals. I should always have a link back to my start page I saw when I logged in. I should always have that menu at the top.

That menu sucks, by the way. What does '...' mean? The menu does not allow for natural movement in many cases, because the submenu changes as soon as you touch the border of an adjoining option during your diagonal movement.

As it was kind enough to mention when I tried viewing my Most Recent Entries, I don't have a journal. Yet I can configure it. And delete it--it is currently 'Activated'.

This is all thanks to LiveJournal's recent implementation of OpenID (formerly Yet Another Distributed Identity Service, or YADIS). I've switched Cork from offering it's own proprietary remote authentication (which nobody ever used) to OpenID (which people do use, somewhat). Logging into Cork with OpenID isn't officially supported yet, but you can keep trying until it does (but it won't make it happen any quicker--well, maybe it will, talk to me). For those of you with Cork accounts (remember, they are the same accounts used on my web log), you can now use OpenID with Cork as a server. See my Cork entry for more information.