RoboGeek

Testing bloged, and "offline" blog editors I'm trying out bloged to handle blog postings. A few days ago I posted a rant about the experience of posting a blog entry through a web browser. I'd found a blog posting written by someone that sent me on a train of thought which took perhaps a half hour to craft into a blog posting. This was edited in the login session in this blogs.sun.com blogging account. Then I went to click SAVE to publish the posting, and was greeted by the login screen telling me that my posting had been lost.

Whatever wonderful attrributes you can say about this web2.0 thing, one attribute sucks big time. The usability experience of editing content in a web browser session is awful. Often you're stuck with a TextArea and having to write HTML by hand, or even worse it's some simplified markup language that's different for each different content management system. Didn't computer users go through this struggle in the 1980's to transition from editors that use a markup language, to WYSIWYG editors?

I've been publishing web sites for over 10 years and have used a variety of technologies to do it. In 1995 when I started vi and emacs were common, and WYSIWYG website editors were rare. But I did manage to use NaviPress for awhile and was hooked on the user experience improvement over handcrafted HTML (bleck).

But, in time, I found content management systems. I could write entries from "anywhere". I didn't have to run specialized software. It took care of creating navigational structures for the site.

This newfangled web2.0 world is full of sites where users create the content while using a browser session. There are a whole slew of usability problems, one of which is the scenario recounted above (user session timeout). Theoretically the advantage of a desktop application is the more mature GUI toolkit and user interaction experience. Some have done amazing things using Javascript, but even after 12+ years of development the HTML form elements and Javascript GUI elements do not have the maturity of decent desktop GUI toolkits.

So here I am trying out bloged. The user experience is a heck of a lot better than previous times I've used it. But it has several annoying issues. I suppose since it's an open source project I could download the code and start fixing issues. hmmm....

UPDATE: I just clicked the publish button. It looks pretty much like the WYSIAWYG view that bloged provides. Curiously there's some text at the end giving me a template for a new posting (e.g. "title goes here" .. "body goes here" ..etc). Another one of the annoying issues, I guess.

The title of your post goes here

And it's body goes here.

You can drag an illustration for this entry onto the left hand pane. If you have just created this blog, don't forget to press the previous arrow to edit the blog header.