usability

Bloglines, long my RSS reader of choice, should either just adopt its long-running "new" beta service as its main production service, or fix up the "old" service it still offers as its default.

The default Bloglines service seems increasingly buggy. Case in point: When trying to move feeds around among my folders today, I got thrown into some kind of error loop involving the Ajax implementation. This kind of thing happens way too often.

This time last week, I complained mightily because I tried to write a blog post in Drupal's browser text entry form and lost it in progress. Drupal 6 did not have any way to save drafts in progress.

This time this week, it does: the Autosave module, just today, got an upgrade for Drupal 6.

Night before last, I had nearly finished writing an item for this blog into the Web entry form offered by Drupal, the open-source site management framework that powers SI.

In wrapping up the post, I went fishing for a link, forgot to do so in a new browser tab, found the article, grabbed the link ... but when I went back to look for my post in the entry form, it was gone -- lost in browser history.

Argh. Argh!

Please understand, I really like Drupal. But losing 45 minutes of work reminded me that WordPress, which I used to use, has Drupal version 6, which I use now, beat in two key areas:

News alerts that lit up pixels on my screen the past two days got me thinking:

• CNN.com sent a breaking news email just after 10 p.m. Eastern last night: "Barack Obama tells packed stadium he accepts Democratic nomination 'with profound gratitude and great humility.'" His nomination long ago secured, this speech was a media-friendly event planned for many weeks; I can think of no urgent need to know he accepted the nomination in it. (All such CNN alerts carry the same subject line -- "CNN Breaking News" -- which seems silly but may, in fact, be a clever ruse. I would not have opened the message if the subject line clued me in on its content.)

Change keeps life interesting, and Ka and I have had our share.

She now works as a principal in the financial services practice at The IQ Business Group. She says she'll still post to her blog here at SI as time allows.

We both are nearing the halfway point in our MBA studies, and just completed final exams for summer term. That means a bit of time off from classwork, which gave me just enough time to:

• Upgrade the system that runs the SI site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.
• Lay in a new design while I'm at it.

A Slashdot post points to an online discussion with Khoi Vinh, design guru at NYTimes.com, in which Vinh is asked how the team there maintains visual consistency. His answer, in part: