andrewducker: (Default)
andrewducker: (running lego man)
1) Rather than collapse comments at all, ever, go to multiple pages sooner. I've had long conversations going on on my journal where multiple people are commenting on each other, and the second the comments were collapsed the conversations stopped. Oh, a few threads staggered on, with people replying back and forth, but the general melee finished the second people couldn't browse the entire thing. It's a terrible way to display information and kills the general discussion stone dead.

2) Contra-intuitively, remove the option in comment emails which takes you straight to "reply to this comment". If you forced people to go to the thread starting at that comment instead then they'd see the whole discussion, note what points had already been responded to by other people, and pick things up there. Instead, what you get is people responding back and forth in a dialogue, not taking in the wider context.
andrewducker: (KittenPenguin)
LJ's notification system has finally gone live to paid users (you free users will have to wait a little longer).

I can finally track comments on other people's journals - and on specific threads I'm interested in! Huzzah!
andrewducker: (lady face)
I'm a very organised person.

*waits for people who have actually met him to pick themselves up off the floor*

When I was younger (about 13), I reorganised all of my parents books into alphabetical order on several occasions (this being a several hour task).  I've spent numerous hours arranging and rearranging files and folders on my computer.

My problem happens when I try to deal with real life, and the fact that it doesn't fit, even slightly, into nice, neat orderly boxes.  I stand there, with a random item from my room in my hand, as my brain grinds away trying to form a coherent system wherein everything has a right place and tell me where this particular thing would go if this were the case.  After a while I realise that no matter what happens I'm not going to get everything in a 'right' place, at which point I lose interest, and go and do something more appealing instead (like read one of the comics which has no doubt turned up during my initial burst of enthusiasm).

Even when it's something nice and simple like sorting books or comics there are problems.  I mean, should Arkham Asylum be filed under Grant Morrison, Dave McKean or Batman?

The wonder of modern tagging systems is that the answer can be "All Three" - the organisation of the book is metadata, describing various places it can be found, all of which point back to the original book, which only actually exists once.

All of which is on my mind because I spent the last 3 hours sorting out my LJ gallery so that all of them having at least half-decent attempts at tags.  This means that you can now find this picture in the "Ed" gallery, the "Padmini" gallery and the "PreBirthday 2005" gallery (for some reason I don't have any photos of the actual 2005 birthday bowling, which is a shame).

I don't think I've spent 4 hours solidly tidying anything in years, but it felt extremely satisfying to get these pics sorted out.  Probably would have been moreso if the interface wasn't such a pain in the arse.

Edit: you can see all of my tags here.
andrewducker: (Default)
Which, to those of you living in,well, snowier places, will comes as no surprise.

However, the picture I took of it has turned out pretty well.

It looked great out of the conservatory, but there wasn't a hope in hell I could get a decent picture through the windows - and if I stood in front of it I'd need a wide-angle lens to do the garden justice, so I ended up standing up on the roof space above the dining room to get a good shot of it. Click on "Full Size" to get it in all its glory.

I also seem to finally be getting the hang of the tagging system in LJ's picture system, although bits of it are currently broken. Just occasionally it'd be nice if LJ didn't have bits that went into production untested.

Intriguing

Oct. 11th, 2005 09:46 pm
andrewducker: (hairy)
Someone's put together a page which matches up the words that appear journals against the mood of those posts.

What's interesting is that 'dog' is most likely to turn up in blogs with the mood 'sad', while 'cat' is most likely to turn up in blogs with the mood 'amused'.
andrewducker: (calvin dancing)
The new "Schools" thing is nice - lifting the idea from Friends Reunited and making it an additional way to find new LJ people.

However....Friends Reunited have the manpower and the focus to make sure that the schools are correct, as well as the regions they are in.  LJ, apparently, hasn't.

Witness the list of "Provinces" in the UK.  Or the number of people enrolled at a certain school in Hogsmeade (Cheers to [livejournal.com profile] pickwick for that second example).

According to comments on this post in [livejournal.com profile] lj_dev there are now 6 different entries for Moscow.

Even the US has problems, with two entries for Texas, and one for Guam.

This seems to be a classic case of people thinking that a problem is easy "Give the users the ability to enter their own data and it'll save us having to get lists of schools ourselves.", but at the same time not giving the users any guidelines as to how the data should be entered.

At this point I'm mostly wondering if LJ is going to pull it until it can be done properly, or just leave it to fester.
andrewducker: (Shade)

LJ Interests meme results



  1. atheist spirituality:
    Stolen gleefully from [livejournal.com profile] brandnewgun - this describes the feelings I get associated with the world, but nevertheless associate with nothing mystical.
  2. chasing amy:
    My favourite Kevin Smith film, and the only one that feels at all adult to me.
  3. david lynch:
    While I don't worship David Lynch, I am fascinated by him - people that show the strangeness in the universe and imply that there's more going on, but we can't quite comprehend it really grab me.
  4. geeks:
    Geeks?  Wouldn't know anything about that :->
  5. la story:
    One of my 5 favourite films, and the only one that might be called happy (although I still maintain that Brazil has a happy ending).  I'm just touched by it every time I see it.
  6. optimism:
    I remain optimistic, despite the best efforts of certain sections of mankind to destroy the planet out from under me, and other sections to bring drama to every moment of their waking lives.
  7. roleplaying:
    Because there's nothing quite like being attacked by a 8 foot tall Spider to get my adrenaline pumping
  8. stirling:
    Lived there for 13 years, before sadly abandoning it to live, ooh, 40 miles away.  Still love the place though.
  9. thomas covenant:
    He's so dreeeeamy.
  10. writing:
    Not that I've been doing nearly enough of it recently.


Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your  interest list.



andrewducker: (Sexy)
Woman gets bit of leg sawn off.  Asks to keep it.  Muses on cannibalism.

Here.

Oh, she's also a good read in general.
andrewducker: (obey)
Firstly, a quote: "Nothing is impossible for a man, so long as the thought that precedes it is "This would probably annoy my girlfriend."

I sent off a suggestion yesterday to allow filtering by tags, and got it rejected with the reason "This is already possible with S2".

Which is just great - I want to be able to click on a tag and say "Don't ever show me things marked 'Pony Porn' again."  Fiddling about with LJ styles does _not_ sound like the most efficient way to do that.  Reminds me, in fact, far too much of the responses people have on Slashdot to the question "I don't like open-source product X because it doesn't do Y", which is usually "It's open source - make the change yourself."  Life is sometimes just too short.

And a quiz - Nerd, Geek or Dork?
Read more... )

Huzzah!

Jun. 25th, 2005 08:39 am
andrewducker: (lady face)
Semagic now does tags!

Now I can finally categorise my entries easily.

Just have to resist the urge to go back through 3637 entries and tag them all!

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