life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

LJ are trying out the beta (at least, I hope it's the beta) of the new profile pages. Here's mine.

Now, I can live with the ugly. What I'm cross about is the lack of functionality. I like the box at the top, apart from the huge pixellated user graphic. However, the two columns are yukky and unfunctional. Perhaps if we all yell enough over at lj_design, they'll not implement it, or at least improve it, but I'm not optimistic.

• the important stuff—bio, interests, contact info—is all shoved away over to the right, with the flist occupying the more prominent left of the page.


• interests are right down in the bottom right corner! The first thing I, and a lot of other users, look for on an info page is what interests we have in common, so why is this now relegated to the least important position?


• mutual friends are no longer bolded in the friend-of list, while if you try to solve this by showing mutual friends


• 'mutual friends' and 'also friend of' lists are separated by the friends list


• in fact, it's now hard to distinguish between 'friended' and 'friend of' at first glance


• when viewing other user's pages, common friends are not bolded
seems to be a temporary bug

• users with more than 150 friends have their lists cut off, meaning that they have to use that stupid directory search with the default icons to see their entire flists


• why is a user's most recent school/university considered to be more important than an email address?


• too much info-light space at the top, neccessitating scrolling


• still no link to the tags list! There is a link to update journal instead, which is redundant as there's also one in the blue drop-down menu at the top of all LiveJournal pages


• bad HTML (eg tables without a closing tag) can break the page.

Come on, LJ. Bebo has better profile pages, for crying out loud. Even if an opt-out is put in place, it looks as though this will be the default, so we'll have to cope with all that scrolling whenever we visit other people's info pages.

The only good thing about it was that I discovered I had some bad HTML in my bio, making the page break at the contact info. How many of those bios full of colourbars have bad HTML that will break the vulnerable two-column style, and how many of those users are going to bother to fix it?

And while I'm bitching about LJ, please please please can we have an option to turn off the loathly icon-full results page as default in the directory search? Especially when you're trying to view someone's >150 friends. What's wrong with a plain list of usernames? More results fit on the page, it takes a quarter of the time to load, and you can't be offended by anyone's default userpic.