QotD, new latest posts in DW

[charmian]

azurelunatic posts her criticisms of the way the LJ QotD/Writer's Block responses are collected and published on LJ news. I totally agree with her about the lack of netiquette here. They need to make the system more transparent, perhaps by putting a box that will let you opt out of publicity on the QotD form.

Currently, the Question of the Day/Writer's Block is not a very widely utilized feature of LJ. Around 600-2000 people seem to participate in each question. This seems to be a feature also shared with Six Apart's Vox.com (Vox, BTW, doesn't seem to have become too successful, despite its media features and all the resources Six Apart poured into it. I wonder why? Of late the site seems not to have released many new features. Stagnating? Or 'finished'? Interestingly, the popular tags make it seem as though it is dominated by discussion of Japanese pop stars.)

[Also, did it strike anyone, that besides the cutting thing, that the news post otherwise seems poorly designed? Whoever makes the LJ news posts now doesn't seem to know much about web design, or even HTML, judging from the amateurish table. Why does someone who doesn't know design in charge of creating the newsletter? Isn't that well, an integral part of a newsletter, especially one highly focused on graphic content? As it is now, the photos are even cut off when viewing the comm in its own style. (IANADP: I am not a design professional)]

Anyway, speaking of new features, Dreamwidth has created a latest posts page, which shows recent public posts on Dreamwidth, with a five minute delay. Some tags are also selectively available.

Also, apparently icon limits will be increased at Dreamwidth. See here. Currently the default Plus level at LJ gives users the ability to use fifteen icons as well.

Comments

[niqaeli]

I totally agree that the news post is poorly designed/implemented. I was doing better graphics design/HTML when I was 15 and had self-taught myself HTML and web design. >:/

[elena]

FWIW, this chipper style of LJ news that we've been getting lately reminds me a lot of Vox's team blog: all contests and fluff, not a single real code improvement except the odd "urgent" bugfix in what seems like years.

[azurelunatic]

The table looks as if it was automatically generated from the Insert Image feature on update.bml.