Verisign aborts audio.weblogs.com simplicity for pointless, clunky AJAXification |
Another silly, stupid and wrong use of AJAX appeared at the ping list of audio.weblogs.com yesterday. They paid off Winer and just couldn’t leave their paws off the interface, could they? What for? Some sideways effort to be trendy maybe?
Prent Rodgers says it well on the Yahoo groups podcasters list:
Now that Dave Winer has sold it to Verisign, it’s covered with web gunk, and doesn’t work. What’s up with that? … it used to be just a list of the most recently submittted podcasts. Now you can’t see anything with Firefox, and almost nothing with IE. Some junior web programmer thought it would be cool to make things fade in and out. Web gunk.
It was just a matter of time before Verisign started screwing up a good thing. Why didn’t we all just chip in and pay Dave to keep this running as a clean service? Hindsight always 20-20. At least Dave got paid, I guess.
[sigh]
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Another case of bigger is not better. I’m starting to fall out of love with my ISP for similar reasons — too many complications and getting out of touch with users.
Comment by Sterling Camden — April 10, 2006 @ 1:39 pm PST
I contacted Mr. Winer and asked him what he thought about this. He pointed out that anybody, myself included, could just use the changes.xml and make our own formatted version. My initial reaction was that wasn’t the point because then that person would have the bandwidth to deal with, but upon more reflection, that’s a good point. I mean just having the output list and making it a static page that updates only once every few minutes, that’s not a huge amount of bandwidth.
Comment by TDavid — April 10, 2006 @ 4:03 pm PST
(I’m sticking my neck out here, so please be gentle!)
I’m a developer at VeriSign on the weblogs.com project. I’m definitely disappointed that you’re unhappy with the new site; we were obviously hoping for a better reaction. I’m also very interested to know what your recommendations are to improve it.
Would you mind elaborating on why this is an wrong/incorrect application of Ajax/Web2.0?
Thanks very much!
Rich
Comment by Rich — April 11, 2006 @ 1:51 pm PST
Hi Rich - thank you for stopping by and having an open mind.
When adding a new ping (this happened to me last Friday) it duplicated the new items in the scroll. Not sure if you’ve fixed that yet or not. And does it work correctly in Opera (a lot of AJAX programs don’t)? Check browser compatibility for IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera at the least.
Also, I noticed you guys are using the scriptaculous.js library, wouldn’t it be better if you really must do this AJAX to code a more streamlined solution? That library sort of has everything and the kitchen sink available and loading, some functions of which you don’t need for what you’re doing, yes? Yeah, it’s cached, but … well, is it all necessary? Really?
And then there is the whole issue of waiting for the AJAX scroll to catch up vs. a mouse scroll to the bottom of a static generated page as it used to be. You just took something that used to be a fast scan of the page (and could be used with CTRL + F in the browser) to be a slowwwwer user experience. I realize the idea was to make it more convenient but now when you load the page you have to wait to see all the data.
Recommendation: if you want to make an AJAX version of this to do it at a separate, new URL — and promote it as such — and keep the plain old static page (that updated every minute or whatever) and worked just fine alone. At least make it a configurable option for users, don’t just ram AJAX down their throats/browsers. Adding AJAX to something like this makes very little sense. Yes, they can sit back and watch it scroll vs. using the mouse scroll wheel, but at what cost to performance (dialup user, browser compatibility, slower page load). For those who want the bells and whistles, they can go to the new page or toggle on/off the page view.
Also, and this is a question not a criticism, what is the advantage of registering/logging in at weblogs vs. not? I mean, I don’t understand why I’d want to sign up just to submit pings via XML RPC? So that part is confusing to me unless there is some great feature not explained there?
Hope this helps, feel free to contact me directly if you’d like. My office number and contact information is available on the homepage.
Comment by TDavid — April 11, 2006 @ 2:51 pm PST
If you are looking for a static list of pings, you might want to checkout trustedblog.com
They seem to have a list of blogs you were talking about where you can scroll down.
Comment by John — April 12, 2006 @ 11:01 pm PST