LiveJournal
Do any of you remember this post that I made two years ago about a suggested new "friends feed"?
My feedback on the initial beta was a mess of negative thoughts, and looking back on the screenshots, yeah, it was a mess, and I think the userbase had a reason to be worried. I guess our voices have been heard. They have decided to let us keep the old friendslist even with the new site scheme.
However, when I see what they've done to the friends feed now two years later. I feel embarrassed by that old post of mine.
I have to express my apologies to the hundreds of strangers who reposted and commented on my post two years ago. I have changed my mind. The friends feed is a great idea. Let's embrace it and make it our own~!
They've put so much work into this and made it a fully functional and beautiful thing. I think it would be a shame if people didn't bother using it. The new LJ site scheme is very user friendly, functional, and easy on the eyes. It's in public BETA right now, and I would strongly advise you to try it out and submit as much feedback as possible. That's the only way for the developers to know what needs fixing, really.
I would also suggest following lj_releases, and lj_feedback in addition to news for all the latest info. The staff members are very helpful and polite, and they hang around the comments and answer as many questions as possible. It's that same feeling of community and "we're building this together" as I felt when I first joined LJ back in 2003. *nostalgic tears*
But yeah, seriously. If you are currently using an old site scheme, here's how you switch to the new one:
On the home page or any of the system style pages.
And once you're using the new scheme, this is how you leave feedback:
Click this icon in the navigation bar when you're at the page you want to leave feedback for. You can also click this icon to switch back to the old site scheme.
The new friends feed is gorgeous!
It has a proper sidebar now that you can fill with various widgets (including your link list!). The widgets can also be reordered in any order you prefer. Don't like a particular widget? You can simply remove it. None of them are mandatory.
The Calender widget in particular is super useful. Click a date, and you'll get all the posts that were posted on that particular day. I am sure we were able to do this in the past as well, but not as easily. I mostly used the calendar for my own journal, not my friendslist. But there have definitely been days where I wished I had a friendslist calendar as well. And now I do!
The main issue with the previous version of the friends feed was the readability. The UI elements were weirdly proportioned, there were tons of useless whitespace, and the font size was completely off. This has, in my opinion, been greatly improved in the current version. Just adding the sidebar on the right really helped make the page easier to read.
Compare old:
With new:
(the background colour is customizable, I've added purple 8D)
The icon to the left of the feed lets you filter the posts you see in your feed - the second icon takes you to the customization page (not many options so far, but they are planning more customization options in the future)
They have added pagination, no more infinite scroll (unless you want infinite scroll, it's still an option). You can even set the number of journal entries that will appear on each page.
You get nifty notifications below the icons to the left if new posts are posted while you have your feed open. The feed won't refresh by itself, you click the notification to refresh and fetch the new entries.
Metadata have been been given a consistent and clean look.
Mood icons aren't displayed on the friends feed, but they are displayed in the new system comment pages, and they'll always be displayed in the journal's own style so I don't see this as an issue at all. I like the consistent look between entries in the feed.
You might notice the (CHANGE) link before the tags? Yeah, people might want to look into their tag settings.
For some reason the default setting seems to be to let friends add your existing tags to your posts ... which is weird (and the reason the (CHANGE) link is shown for some posts on the friends feed.
They have "hidden away" the features that let you track, share, and add a post to memories. Hover your cursor over an entry on your feed, and you'll get the following little mini sidebar of options
The new profile pages look really good too! I love the new sidebar with stats. And interests have been given a separate tab! It's all good.
... I have way too many schools added.
I must admit I was extremely skeptical to the whole social capital feature. It's opt-in, so it's not a mandatory rating system (and I don't think it should be). But now that I've been opted in for a little while, I find I quite like it. I enjoy following the list of top journals on the home page. Once I spent a little time hiding certain suggested communities and authors from the posts that are featured on the home page, I found a practical use for the home page as well. I browse through it now and again and often find interesting little entries to read. Hiding ONTD and a whole crap load of Cyrillic journals helped a lot.
There are lots of little bugs and cosmetic inconsistencies that need to be addressed, but so far the new site scheme (I wonder what it will be called~) is looking really good. It feels fresh. I hope it'll make people passionate about LJ again and hopefully also attract new users.
What do you guys think about the recent changes? Are you ready to roll with the punches, or do you still prefer Horizon/XColibur?
Did you know that you can use subject lines in comments again now? :D (ask me how)
My feedback on the initial beta was a mess of negative thoughts, and looking back on the screenshots, yeah, it was a mess, and I think the userbase had a reason to be worried. I guess our voices have been heard. They have decided to let us keep the old friendslist even with the new site scheme.
However, when I see what they've done to the friends feed now two years later. I feel embarrassed by that old post of mine.
I have to express my apologies to the hundreds of strangers who reposted and commented on my post two years ago. I have changed my mind. The friends feed is a great idea. Let's embrace it and make it our own~!
They've put so much work into this and made it a fully functional and beautiful thing. I think it would be a shame if people didn't bother using it. The new LJ site scheme is very user friendly, functional, and easy on the eyes. It's in public BETA right now, and I would strongly advise you to try it out and submit as much feedback as possible. That's the only way for the developers to know what needs fixing, really.
I would also suggest following lj_releases, and lj_feedback in addition to news for all the latest info. The staff members are very helpful and polite, and they hang around the comments and answer as many questions as possible. It's that same feeling of community and "we're building this together" as I felt when I first joined LJ back in 2003. *nostalgic tears*
But yeah, seriously. If you are currently using an old site scheme, here's how you switch to the new one:
On the home page or any of the system style pages.
And once you're using the new scheme, this is how you leave feedback:
Click this icon in the navigation bar when you're at the page you want to leave feedback for. You can also click this icon to switch back to the old site scheme.
The new friends feed is gorgeous!
It has a proper sidebar now that you can fill with various widgets (including your link list!). The widgets can also be reordered in any order you prefer. Don't like a particular widget? You can simply remove it. None of them are mandatory.
The Calender widget in particular is super useful. Click a date, and you'll get all the posts that were posted on that particular day. I am sure we were able to do this in the past as well, but not as easily. I mostly used the calendar for my own journal, not my friendslist. But there have definitely been days where I wished I had a friendslist calendar as well. And now I do!
The main issue with the previous version of the friends feed was the readability. The UI elements were weirdly proportioned, there were tons of useless whitespace, and the font size was completely off. This has, in my opinion, been greatly improved in the current version. Just adding the sidebar on the right really helped make the page easier to read.
Compare old:
With new:
(the background colour is customizable, I've added purple 8D)
The icon to the left of the feed lets you filter the posts you see in your feed - the second icon takes you to the customization page (not many options so far, but they are planning more customization options in the future)
They have added pagination, no more infinite scroll (unless you want infinite scroll, it's still an option). You can even set the number of journal entries that will appear on each page.
You get nifty notifications below the icons to the left if new posts are posted while you have your feed open. The feed won't refresh by itself, you click the notification to refresh and fetch the new entries.
Metadata have been been given a consistent and clean look.
Mood icons aren't displayed on the friends feed, but they are displayed in the new system comment pages, and they'll always be displayed in the journal's own style so I don't see this as an issue at all. I like the consistent look between entries in the feed.
You might notice the (CHANGE) link before the tags? Yeah, people might want to look into their tag settings.
For some reason the default setting seems to be to let friends add your existing tags to your posts ... which is weird (and the reason the (CHANGE) link is shown for some posts on the friends feed.
They have "hidden away" the features that let you track, share, and add a post to memories. Hover your cursor over an entry on your feed, and you'll get the following little mini sidebar of options
The new profile pages look really good too! I love the new sidebar with stats. And interests have been given a separate tab! It's all good.
... I have way too many schools added.
I must admit I was extremely skeptical to the whole social capital feature. It's opt-in, so it's not a mandatory rating system (and I don't think it should be). But now that I've been opted in for a little while, I find I quite like it. I enjoy following the list of top journals on the home page. Once I spent a little time hiding certain suggested communities and authors from the posts that are featured on the home page, I found a practical use for the home page as well. I browse through it now and again and often find interesting little entries to read. Hiding ONTD and a whole crap load of Cyrillic journals helped a lot.
There are lots of little bugs and cosmetic inconsistencies that need to be addressed, but so far the new site scheme (I wonder what it will be called~) is looking really good. It feels fresh. I hope it'll make people passionate about LJ again and hopefully also attract new users.
What do you guys think about the recent changes? Are you ready to roll with the punches, or do you still prefer Horizon/XColibur?
Did you know that you can use subject lines in comments again now? :D (ask me how)