On Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:29:20 -0700 in K Barrett wrote:

Some of the ning network forums look interesting. Here's one on crime
fiction that's active. People post music, podcasts all sorts of stuff.
http://crimespace.ning.com/

Ah, a shining example of a forum web app I don't like.

Let's take
http://crimespace.ning.com/forum/topics/words-1

We have a blog post.
We have replies to a blog post.
We have replies to replies (lather rinse repeat).

Now suppose someone else replies to L.J. Parker's first reply,
I have to skim through the whole damn thread to see if there's
anything new. It gets worse the deeper you get.

The opening text width is incompatible with the number of words
humans are really comfortable processing per line.
Without severe fiddling with the application, I get the joyful
black text on white background. While this is effective on a reflective
surface such as paper, it's less than ideal.

RSSfeed. I've heard great things about rssfeed aggregators.
I sort of use one for grabbing some multimedia files regularly.
It's great, if more than 20 items show up since the last time I query
it (every 15 minutes), I lose the new items that weren't on the 20 returned.
And if nothing changed, yep, I retrieve the same 20 again.

And standards on reliably retrieving an rssfeed... fat chance.

Now for the next bit of fun.
if i want to reply on ning.com, I have to register yet another ID
and remember yet another password.
Later, rinse, repeat for facebook, myspace, livejournal, twitter....
Yes, there are credential wallet options. There seem to be
slightly fewer of them than there are major sites.

Redundancy.. when the folks at ning.com forget to renew their domain
and someone else scoops it, 1) Assume your userid and password will be
successfully phished (Hope you didn't use it anywhere else).
2) All of that content will be gone until someone figured out what the
hell happened.
And when the battery room blows up, like happened almost a year ago
at a major colo, odds are it's gone gone gone...
--
Chris Dukes
davej eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. I have two. Bullshit.