Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Blog service blunders and a couple of updates
I mentioned in my post of 9-28-06 that Webring had announced their intention to switch from free for everyone to paid for all but those few that were only members or managers of a handful of rings; I predicted disaster at the time, and it turns out that I was right... which isn't a cause for pride, since anyone OTHER than the owners of Webring would have been able to predict that going from free to paid would make them hemorrhage members and rings, especially given their poor record of handling technical issues and the downright nastiness of their so-called support department.
Mind you, I WARNED them about what was going on when I started getting flooded with emails from ring managers announcing their intention to delete all their rings and referring repeatedly to a mass exodus from Webring; the admin who responded to me denied that any such thing was going on. I forwarded him a bunch of the emails I'd gotten as proof; he never wrote me back, naturally. Eventually, though, they were unable to keep denying reality, because a couple of months later they finally announced that they would NOT be eliminating the free service, and that only those who wanted their fancy new features would have to pay. It was too little too late, of course; I went to their site to have a look around, and discovered that, although there were still 2 months to go before payment would have started being due when the announcement was made, both my personal ring list and their directory have been GUTTED... about 2/3 of the rings are GONE, with lots of those remaining having wildly reduced #'s of sites in them. I mourn the loss of all those excellent rings, and feel terrible for the many ring managers who had put so much time and effort into rings that they needlessly deleted... imagine how they felt when they learned that if they hadn't been in such a rush to bail out in their understandable anger they could've kept their rings.
Even when $ isn't involved, any change to an online service is cause for dismay, because there's usually some sort of disaster involved in the implementation, usually because of a lack of thinking things through; BlogMad's recent attempt at "upgrading" is a perfect example. They'd mentioned that their new credit allocation system was available, and somehow thought that meant that every user would rush to adopt it even though the old system was still working, and therefore that they could eliminate the old system WITHOUT PRIOR WARNING at their whim and all would be well; as you've probably already foreseen, the result was that most members were getting no BlogMad hits because they had NOT adopted the new system, and the few who HAD made the switch were having all their credits sucked up because only THEIR blogs were in circulation. The BlogMad team is as bright, hard-working and user-friendly as can be, but while they mastered the technical elements of their service they forgot about the human ones.
NeoWorx (the site from which I get the sidebar doodad that shows the flags for the countries of my online visitors), in contrast, instantly alerted the users to THEIR new system by changing our displays into requests to log in and get new code, but reached stunning depths of technical bungling with the setup they had for us to format our new displays: They'd replaced the old, well-designed small ones with huge ones, some with elaborate Flash skins and some plain; since a big, mostly-empty solid-colored box wouldn't look too nice, I went right for the Flash designs. I spent about an hour trying to come up with a combination of patterned, shifting background and text color that was readable; I didn't really succeed, because all of the designs were such that the text had to overlay artwork with both light and dark elements, meaning that no color showed clearly in all areas... VERY poor implementation of what could've been a neat idea. Having decided that I'd done my best, I generated the code, installed it... and got a solid green box. Several more attempts with other Flash skins got the same result; it's possible that those choices are only for paying customers, but if that's the case they shouldn't have been options in the "edit pages" of non-paying users, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
It might just have been that the system wasn't fully set up to create the proper code for the Flash options, because, as it turned out, there were several other options that weren't there when I started struggling with it that gradually got added to the control panel... or maybe had been there originally but vanished before I logged in and later returned... in any case, it was absolutely surreal trying to design a usable display with everything changing constantly. There wasn't an option to reduce the height of the box at first, so I altered the final code to crop most of it off; sadly, the border was set up for a full-sized box, and so the bottom border was missing. I changed the color of the border to white, which eliminated that problem but gave me text floating in a bunch of odd-looking blank space. I then changed the background color for the display so that it'd show as something separate from the surrounding sidebar; inexplicably, none of the choices offered were light colors, and the color isn't included in the final code (because even the plain boxes are Flash and so the color is stored in the system) so I couldn't just edit in what I wanted later... and was thus stuck with a too-vivid lavender as my best choice.
I thought I was done, but a couple of hours later my display had totally changed, and the link to get to the edit screen on the NeoWorx site had disappeared; an email to tech support got the right display back eventually, except for the width which I was able to fix myself because the edit link was back. Weirdly, a series of new border-related controls had appeared in the interim; none of them fixed my problem, but they made me realize that, unbelievably, the edit page was still under construction although users had been instructed to use it all day long. I saved my width change, republished, and was done... until a few hours later, when the display changed AGAIN, to another totally different design. I went back to the edit page to re-redo it, and a new column had been added to one of the tables of choices; a HEIGHT control, at last!! The field to enter it was only 1 digit wide, although the width in pixels had to be THREE digits, but it was THERE, and it worked (it accepted 3 digits, it just could only show 1 at a time)... which meant that I could have my border back, which meant that I could get rid of the lavender background, which meant that I had a decent-looking display again.
I had to struggle with that @#$%^&*! thing ALL DAY LONG in order to duplicate the perfectly good display I'd had before the system change... except it's not as good as it was, because before the box resized automatically to fit the # of countries being displayed, and now the box size is static so I have to have a chunk of wasted space most of the time to accommodate the sporadic bursts when I've got 4-5 countries being represented at once. All that effort from NeoWorx to switch from an excellent system to one that's fancier but doesn't do its JOB, providing a useful listing of online countries, anywhere near as well. I'm sure there's some valid technical reason for why it ALL has to be Flash now, and why the boxes can't resize... well, I'm not really SURE, but I'll charitably assume that it's at least likely... but couldn't they have TESTED the new system before they threw it at us, making sure that everything on the edit page was present and properly designed, that the Flash skins could be turned into readable displays that would actually appear on users' sites, and that the designs people created wouldn't be replaced at random with other ones? (Edit: NeoWorx sent out an email to all the members a few days after I wrote this announcing that the display that'd be for free users henceforth would be... the one I originally had!! AARRGGHHHHHH)
And here's the updates:
The good news: We haven't seen a single rat on our patio before it's been fully dark since one of their loathsome brethren got killed by a hawk (see my last post); we don't know if the scent of the hawk on whatever surfaces it touched is scaring them off or if all of the rodents who'd been coming in the late afternoon happened to be there to witness the attack and have re-thought the wisdom of coming out of hiding during daylight hours, but either way it's allowing the birds to have their dinner unmolested, at least for now.
The bad news: Christmas has come early for my mother; first, they thought she had pneumonia AGAIN, but, even worse, they eventually decided it's a blood clot in her lung instead... and since she's elderly, a breast cancer patient (stage 3), and is recovering from surgery and radiation, they kept her at the hospital overnight for observation before sending her home with painkillers and various other meds. She's endured blood thinners before, and had an awful time on them (she got massive rashes and couldn't even brush her teeth without bleeding profusely), so she's EXTREMELY unhappy.
I suspect that there'll be very little fa-la-la-la-la-ing in the Omni family this holiday season...
Mind you, I WARNED them about what was going on when I started getting flooded with emails from ring managers announcing their intention to delete all their rings and referring repeatedly to a mass exodus from Webring; the admin who responded to me denied that any such thing was going on. I forwarded him a bunch of the emails I'd gotten as proof; he never wrote me back, naturally. Eventually, though, they were unable to keep denying reality, because a couple of months later they finally announced that they would NOT be eliminating the free service, and that only those who wanted their fancy new features would have to pay. It was too little too late, of course; I went to their site to have a look around, and discovered that, although there were still 2 months to go before payment would have started being due when the announcement was made, both my personal ring list and their directory have been GUTTED... about 2/3 of the rings are GONE, with lots of those remaining having wildly reduced #'s of sites in them. I mourn the loss of all those excellent rings, and feel terrible for the many ring managers who had put so much time and effort into rings that they needlessly deleted... imagine how they felt when they learned that if they hadn't been in such a rush to bail out in their understandable anger they could've kept their rings.
Even when $ isn't involved, any change to an online service is cause for dismay, because there's usually some sort of disaster involved in the implementation, usually because of a lack of thinking things through; BlogMad's recent attempt at "upgrading" is a perfect example. They'd mentioned that their new credit allocation system was available, and somehow thought that meant that every user would rush to adopt it even though the old system was still working, and therefore that they could eliminate the old system WITHOUT PRIOR WARNING at their whim and all would be well; as you've probably already foreseen, the result was that most members were getting no BlogMad hits because they had NOT adopted the new system, and the few who HAD made the switch were having all their credits sucked up because only THEIR blogs were in circulation. The BlogMad team is as bright, hard-working and user-friendly as can be, but while they mastered the technical elements of their service they forgot about the human ones.
NeoWorx (the site from which I get the sidebar doodad that shows the flags for the countries of my online visitors), in contrast, instantly alerted the users to THEIR new system by changing our displays into requests to log in and get new code, but reached stunning depths of technical bungling with the setup they had for us to format our new displays: They'd replaced the old, well-designed small ones with huge ones, some with elaborate Flash skins and some plain; since a big, mostly-empty solid-colored box wouldn't look too nice, I went right for the Flash designs. I spent about an hour trying to come up with a combination of patterned, shifting background and text color that was readable; I didn't really succeed, because all of the designs were such that the text had to overlay artwork with both light and dark elements, meaning that no color showed clearly in all areas... VERY poor implementation of what could've been a neat idea. Having decided that I'd done my best, I generated the code, installed it... and got a solid green box. Several more attempts with other Flash skins got the same result; it's possible that those choices are only for paying customers, but if that's the case they shouldn't have been options in the "edit pages" of non-paying users, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
It might just have been that the system wasn't fully set up to create the proper code for the Flash options, because, as it turned out, there were several other options that weren't there when I started struggling with it that gradually got added to the control panel... or maybe had been there originally but vanished before I logged in and later returned... in any case, it was absolutely surreal trying to design a usable display with everything changing constantly. There wasn't an option to reduce the height of the box at first, so I altered the final code to crop most of it off; sadly, the border was set up for a full-sized box, and so the bottom border was missing. I changed the color of the border to white, which eliminated that problem but gave me text floating in a bunch of odd-looking blank space. I then changed the background color for the display so that it'd show as something separate from the surrounding sidebar; inexplicably, none of the choices offered were light colors, and the color isn't included in the final code (because even the plain boxes are Flash and so the color is stored in the system) so I couldn't just edit in what I wanted later... and was thus stuck with a too-vivid lavender as my best choice.
I thought I was done, but a couple of hours later my display had totally changed, and the link to get to the edit screen on the NeoWorx site had disappeared; an email to tech support got the right display back eventually, except for the width which I was able to fix myself because the edit link was back. Weirdly, a series of new border-related controls had appeared in the interim; none of them fixed my problem, but they made me realize that, unbelievably, the edit page was still under construction although users had been instructed to use it all day long. I saved my width change, republished, and was done... until a few hours later, when the display changed AGAIN, to another totally different design. I went back to the edit page to re-redo it, and a new column had been added to one of the tables of choices; a HEIGHT control, at last!! The field to enter it was only 1 digit wide, although the width in pixels had to be THREE digits, but it was THERE, and it worked (it accepted 3 digits, it just could only show 1 at a time)... which meant that I could have my border back, which meant that I could get rid of the lavender background, which meant that I had a decent-looking display again.
I had to struggle with that @#$%^&*! thing ALL DAY LONG in order to duplicate the perfectly good display I'd had before the system change... except it's not as good as it was, because before the box resized automatically to fit the # of countries being displayed, and now the box size is static so I have to have a chunk of wasted space most of the time to accommodate the sporadic bursts when I've got 4-5 countries being represented at once. All that effort from NeoWorx to switch from an excellent system to one that's fancier but doesn't do its JOB, providing a useful listing of online countries, anywhere near as well. I'm sure there's some valid technical reason for why it ALL has to be Flash now, and why the boxes can't resize... well, I'm not really SURE, but I'll charitably assume that it's at least likely... but couldn't they have TESTED the new system before they threw it at us, making sure that everything on the edit page was present and properly designed, that the Flash skins could be turned into readable displays that would actually appear on users' sites, and that the designs people created wouldn't be replaced at random with other ones? (Edit: NeoWorx sent out an email to all the members a few days after I wrote this announcing that the display that'd be for free users henceforth would be... the one I originally had!! AARRGGHHHHHH)
And here's the updates:
The good news: We haven't seen a single rat on our patio before it's been fully dark since one of their loathsome brethren got killed by a hawk (see my last post); we don't know if the scent of the hawk on whatever surfaces it touched is scaring them off or if all of the rodents who'd been coming in the late afternoon happened to be there to witness the attack and have re-thought the wisdom of coming out of hiding during daylight hours, but either way it's allowing the birds to have their dinner unmolested, at least for now.
The bad news: Christmas has come early for my mother; first, they thought she had pneumonia AGAIN, but, even worse, they eventually decided it's a blood clot in her lung instead... and since she's elderly, a breast cancer patient (stage 3), and is recovering from surgery and radiation, they kept her at the hospital overnight for observation before sending her home with painkillers and various other meds. She's endured blood thinners before, and had an awful time on them (she got massive rashes and couldn't even brush her teeth without bleeding profusely), so she's EXTREMELY unhappy.
I suspect that there'll be very little fa-la-la-la-la-ing in the Omni family this holiday season...
