life, liberty and the pursuit of geekiness

LiveJournal are at it again. Go to Browsing Options and click the radio button for 'Beta Navigation'.

So many links! Oh, and lj_design has learned from the last debacle and disabled comments; there's a form to fill out for feedback instead.

Now it's not spork-out-your-own-eyes like the original verson of the profile page, but it's too bold and busy. Fortunately users can choose their own site scheme, so the mass outrage should be absent this time. It's good that they're trying to make the main page more user-friendly, but why can't we get simple things like a link to Tags on our profiles, or a 'default to text' option in the directory search?

Just dashing in to say:

LiveJournal did listen to the feedback.

The beta for the info page now looks like this. It's not perfect, but it's a vast improvement on the previous version. Personally I like grrliz's mock-up, but they seem to be incorporating some features of it.

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.

The Doctor says it all. Don't worry, this is fandom, not RL.

My default summer shoes are navy gutties (rubber soles, canvas uppers—what's the English name?). It seems that all makers of trainers now cater soley for the chav market (shiny white trainers, what use are they??), apart from Converse and its copycats. I bought a pair of black Converse knock-offs for £6 yesterday, which with a certain inevitability have been dubbed 'Doctor Shoe'.

LJ seems to have melted down over the breast-feeding icons thing. Simple solution: stop using default icons on search pages. It looks stupid, it eats bandwidth and takes forever to load on dial-up.

Something has happened to our DVD-RW drive. Whenever I put in an audio CD, it takes about ten minutes to load, with lots of whirring and groaning that never happened before. CDs with programs on it won't run at all. I've tried System Restore and scanning for viruses (but the subscription expired this morning, too), but nothing helps. What am I going to do??

Here's Cordelia.

• Title: My Heart and My Honour
• Author: jediowl
• Recipient: altariel1


• Rating/any warnings: Mentions of rape and torture, so, um, no under-10s? Rather less graphic than the books, anyway. Contains traces of Miles. Is ridiculously long.


• Any other information: This fic owes a great deal to ajhalluk, both for a very thorough beta-reading, and for mentioning some author called Lois McMaster Bujold so often that when I saw a book called Cetaganda on a library shelf, I said, 'This seems familiar...'



• Summary: altariel1 requested a 'missing scene' (e.g. his face-off with Aral from The Vor Game, or the conversation with Cordelia about Serg, or the moments before the drop from the balcony).
  Being permanently unable to make up what I'm pleased to call my mind, I did two missing scenes, weighing in at a total of >8000 words.
  Set during the closing part of The Vor Game. Gregor dealing with power, what his father was, and growing up.

Part I: Aral

Part II: Cordelia


( looong )