They seem to have a list of blogs you were talking about where you can scroll down.

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.

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