Popular Poppyseed
After playing around a little with different themes, I settled with the poppyseed theme, for now. It's got a warm and sunny mood to it, just the right thing I need now in cold, cold Zurich.
I still have trouble with creating posts though. This AJAX editor looks really nice, but the usability problem that comes with that is, you start expecting Word-like behavior. Being a Web consultant, I know it is far from a true Office application. But none the less, because of the buttons suggesting expected functionality, you naturally assume it will work the same way.
And it just doesn't. In the best cases, Web-based text editors use W3 standard technology, combined with AJAX or simple JavaScript. But in any case, what's happening in background is not simple. Editing text is one thing, but the representation you see is actually a layer that mimics the actual output. And sometimes, without wanting it, you can create havoc using this visually rich text editor.
It would be nice of VOX to provide some HTML editing function, or textile, or something at least that lets me turn off this editor. I understand they don't want people to hack their profiles too much. And I'm really, really, really glad they don't follow this "open door" kind of philosophy of Myspace, where people just put a giant div-layer over everything, to hide the ugly table-based markup of Myspace. Self designed Myspace profiles are usually based on a theme someone wrote, usually a very ugly hack in itself.
VOX is growing on me. There are a few areas of which I feel could use better search functions, but then this also relates to the people using tags. I can see tags are becoming popular and people are starting to grasp their functionality, but let's not forget that VOX is still populated by a geeky crowd.
And it just doesn't. In the best cases, Web-based text editors use W3 standard technology, combined with AJAX or simple JavaScript. But in any case, what's happening in background is not simple. Editing text is one thing, but the representation you see is actually a layer that mimics the actual output. And sometimes, without wanting it, you can create havoc using this visually rich text editor.
It would be nice of VOX to provide some HTML editing function, or textile, or something at least that lets me turn off this editor. I understand they don't want people to hack their profiles too much. And I'm really, really, really glad they don't follow this "open door" kind of philosophy of Myspace, where people just put a giant div-layer over everything, to hide the ugly table-based markup of Myspace. Self designed Myspace profiles are usually based on a theme someone wrote, usually a very ugly hack in itself.
VOX is growing on me. There are a few areas of which I feel could use better search functions, but then this also relates to the people using tags. I can see tags are becoming popular and people are starting to grasp their functionality, but let's not forget that VOX is still populated by a geeky crowd.
Comments
Which brings up an improvement idea for the design team of VOX. You could add a larger/smaller font button, which toggles the basic font size declared for the body-tag in the CSS. I would use a 20% increment of increased or reduced font size, so people have an option to adjust the font size to their resolution, and it wouldn't disturb the design of the theme.