Slumber

You really enjoy pulling the rug out of everyone, and I bet you wonder why everyone hates you. Minus the supremely slick hipster site vibe I'm getting from the design, so far I'm actually liking all these changes.

There's a section that makes Communities easier (possibly) to advertise and browse, which is great because LJ needs its users to use LJ to survive. For a while my LJ usage was floundering until I found hogwartsishome, and with Community Directory so front and center in the nav bar, I think that could be a really good thing for the site.

The Feed tab will take some getting used to, but once I'm on my flist I'm back to the layout I know and love, so the majority of my actual user experience doesn't change. I won't really need Shop or Help, but My Blog leads to some interesting (new? previously hidden?) sections, like statistics. The Tags link there is actually super useful since I've just started working with that section for hh_sugarquill, so I like that it's easier to access now. It felt buried before.

The Post In Blog tab was too far to the right for me (but my monitor is also pretty wide) and not as intuitive as it would have been had it just been placed under My Blog, but the Inbox link is a nice addition. Again, it surfaces previously hard to find links based on, I'm guessing, what people primarily use.

From a cursory look, the rest just looks like it's been given a facelift. I'm meh on the design -- I really wish we as a society can move away from this whole 'light grey text on sterile white background is AWESOME' web design aesthetic; for fuck's sake, I can't read a damn thing -- but the old site was really old. From playing in InsaneJournal (which took LJ's opensource coding and never really added much more to it) I'm not so sure that I'd trade in the ability to edit comments just so I could have subject lines in my comments anymore. It would be good to have both, for sure, but editing comments has been really great for LJ.

But of course, no matter how much LiveJournal improves the site, it will never be able to stop angering its users. Is an email to every registered user so hard to do? Fuck knows I get emails from everyone else for the smallest tweak. Just warn us that shit like this is happening, and maybe, even better, tell us why you're doing it. What user experience pain points are you addressing? What hasn't changed? What can we do better now? What about the features you know we love?

If Livejournal acted like it thought of its users before it did anything, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't annoy so many people as much as it did. But the time to start reaching out was not last week. It was not even last year. It was years ago, when they did this first. Maybe even the second time they did this. But they've done it so often and so unapologetically that the reaction, by now, is Pavlovian. LJ changes something? Fuck, they don't know what they're doing; Of fucking course they did; etc etc.

Oh well. Right now, that's just the way it is. If LJ had had just one competition early on, instead of the five that popped up, it wouldn't be here today. They got lucky.

Us, not so much.

It's been so difficult to work with the last couple of days. So far I'm queued up at Dreamwidth to import all my entries from this LJ to the Dreamwidth one. I think I'll also be importing my fic journal over there. Grr.

In other news, anybody interested in beta-ing my hp_zombiefest entry? (PS. Sign up now!) It's 75% done, will be under 4K, gen, involves Harry, Luna, Theodore, Zacharias. I should have it ready by the weekend, maybe sooner--I just want to get it out of the way so I stop distracting myself with it. I'll need help with SpaG, phrasing, possibly structure although I think I'm okay with the way I have it set up right now, and maybe title choices? Mira Grant and Max Brooks are my zombie influences, in case that's important. PM/email me if you're up for it, and I'll be grateful forever! ♥

If you've been living under a rock, you should probably know that LJ has laid off a lot of people, and basically, people are either saying it's the end of LJ or that people are just getting spooked all over again.

The funny thing is, it's actually GJ that bit the dust. :|

Well, whatever, I would rather just make sure I've got my LJ backed up properly. So I remembered my password for insanejournal (username, by the by, is also slumber, which is also my handle in journalfen), and now I am shopping around for a good back-up program. I'm using a Mac, and I'd prefer it if the program also imported comments from the entries.

Flist, any good ideas/suggestions?

ETA: I have started friending some of you on IJ, which I did oh-so-systematically by friending one person I knew in IJ, and from that person's flist, looking at who else I knew, and from there, well, you get it. :| Haven't backed my LJ up there yet, but yes. You may also leave your IJ/JF username here and I'll get to friending.

Is anybody else annoyed that they see LJ cuts labeled You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors, get excited, click on the cut, and find out it's some meme or something completely PG-rated?

Do people CLICK on the cuts in the first place because they think they're about to view content inappropriate for minors, or is that just me? Because if you do, I should have done that ages ago whenever I put my emo under cuts.