Archive for September, 2007

Java blogs?! part 1

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

Javablogs is a fine lovely idea, and I’m sure pretty much everyone uses it to decide what they should think and say on any given day. Now, aside from the actual content, there are some highly irritating ‘features’ if you will that said site suffers from.

First, let us consider the popular entries list. Enough idiotic items have risen to the top of the list to demonstrate that there’s absolutely no quality filter going on. The very idea is in fact fairly flawed, as one can rise up to any day’s list by following two very simple procedures:

  • Add your story around midnight
  • Have a snappy title The first can be addressed very easily. Instead of maintaining an absolute 24 hour range for popular entries, switch to a rolling range. As in, show the most popular entries for the last 24 hours. This ensures that the list doesn’t become completely empty every night, and that every story gets a fair chance of getting up there regardless of when it was sucked in.

    The second is less easily fixed, and would involve a lot more work. Some sort of moderation system would be rather neat (a la Slashdot).

    We also have that annoying navigational ‘quirk’ on entries. Clicking on a new story’s title will take you to that blog, but clicking on the ‘view’ link under it will….also take you to that blog! If you want to read the story on javablogs (for example, for any freeroller story), you in fact need to click on ‘details’. Nevermind that ‘view’ will also show you details. Some sort of visual cues as to which is which would be nice.