First thoughts

Posted on January 30, 2003
Filed Under Blogging, Imported, from weblogs.asp.net |

You’ll notice that “The Grand Experiment” is posted twice. Although I could delete the second entry, I’ve left it into illustrate a point. More on that in a couple minutes.

Certain things that happen here will be simple learning curve issues and won’t warrant commentary. Others are real head-scratchers and make you go “Hmm.”

First, a little bit about my editing environment. I am posting from an under-powered, over-taxed 600MHz Pentium III-powered Toshiba Tecra 8100 with 128MB of RAM. My current browser of choice is Internet Explorer 6.0 (with all the patches and security updates) though I do have the latest non-beta build of Mozilla installed as well. This particular computer is not known for its stability so if there is some flakiness that I comment on, it may necessarily be the fault of ASPNetWebLog.

Anyway, all of that serves as preface for my first comment - whenever I type, my CPU utilization maxes out and there is a slight (fractions - maybe .5 - of a second) lag between the entry of letters on the keyboard and their display on the screen. I think it may have something to do with the edit widget of choice here since I don’t have this problem anywhere else - including the WYSIWYG mode of Radio. Perhaps there’s some real-time parsing going on or something but it’s a minor annoyance to say the least.

My second comment is related to the aforementioned double posting. The editing environment has (among others) two buttons - “Save” and “Add New”. The first time I wanted to post, I clicked “Save”. The UI gave me appropriate feedback and when the screen refreshed, the post was still in the edit window. “Hmm,” I thought, and clicked the “Add New” button. The UI again gave me feedback and the post was still in the edit window. As a matter of fact, according to the text below the buttons, I’m current editing “The Grand Experiment”. What’s up with that?

Some suggestions:

  1. Obviously, figure out what’s slowing down the editing interface and make it faster.
  2. Label the buttons more clearly explicitly. I’m certain that one of them should say “Post” or something similar. It has become an expected in the weblog paradigm and should help to make new users more comfortable.
  3. (Let me reiterate here, that IE flakiness may be specific to my machine.) When an item is posted, remove if from the edit window and bring up a fresh, new post. Perhaps that’s what the “Add New” button is meant to to do, but it didn’t work for me the one time (so far) I tried it.

Finally, I particularly noticed the absence of “shortcuts” in this tool. I didn’t realize how much I used them until I couldn’t.

Ah well, these are the joys of new toys. At least I have something to post about now. “:)”

  

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