Ryan’s Journey

I heard a ton of buzz around the new version of WordPress. One, or rather, the only thing I heard about is the beautiful admin panel. I could not be more dissatisfied with it! Why you ask?

While I the layout is nothing special, except for the write a post page, the color scheme is terrible. The first time I saw it, I had to look away do to the colors. I am quite sorry to say, who ever has designed the admin panel, needs to read up on contrasting. Considering the panel came from Happy Cog Studios, which is headed by Jeffrey Zeldman, this just makes me even more sad.

Sidenote About the Write a New Post Page

I have to give this a thumbs down as well. It seems like it is set for somebody who is blogging in the contributer or writer role, not an administrator. On my 17-inch screen, I have to scroll to get to one of WordPress’ key features, the categorizing of the post. Seeing how I am a big keyboard user, all this makes me do is use the mouse more. I will leave out the minimal access you get if you navigate by keyboard in the most important part of the panel.

So, in conclusion, the biggest thing that was widely acclaimed about, is nothing but disappointment for me. The one thing that is particularly nice is the built-in feeling of the WordPress Stats plugin. I cannot wait until the Popularity Contest plugin gets updated.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress 2.5

About a week ago, I found an old comment from a friend of mine. I decided to check her blog out since it had been a while. I noticed that she was getting quite a number of comments per post, and I asked her what she did she do to get so many comments. She said she used two services to bring people in. From the two services she mentioned, I decided to try Entrecard, which claims to be the new way to drop your business card 2.0.

I don’t buy that fully. The welcome page, talks about how in restaurants you drop your business card in a box or something to win yourself a free lunch. The way Entrecard works is an user puts a small piece of [javascript] code somewhere on their blog, and other Entrecard users click the gold bar at the bottom to “drop their card.”

You gain 1 credit per card you drop, and another credit per card dropped by others on your blog. What then do is use your credits to buy space on other blogs. So you may see something other than an image saying my blog title near the bottom of the side bar, that means somebody paid to advertise on my site.

In the help section, they post a final note on dropping your card. They encourage you to read at least one post and comment before dropping your card. I know I try to read a few lines of the post before dropping my card.

Technorati Tags: entrecard, ad, advertising

I was just reloading my Gmail, and as you can see, something went wrong and didn’t load properly. I just had to laugh. It shows you how much manipulating it takes to have Gmail display the way it does.

At first I was like uh what in the world, then I did some playing around. Firefox has this built-in feature that allows you to wipe out all that fancy styling that is used, and let’s you see what the bare bones HTML looks like. Take a look at Gmail, it gets pretty nasty to look at. No wonder it fails at validation.

Technorati Tags: google, gmail, e-mail

I just tried to sign in and check Facebook, and got the following message at sign in:

Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I checked with a friend and they could log in fine, how weird is that? Is anybody else having an issue with it? I joined Facebook not too long after it launched, this is the first time I can recall not being able log in due to maintenance. Can you log in?