3 posts tagged “vox”

I can use HTML in comments, but not in blog posts or in my user profile.

In blog posts I'm forced to use the JavaScript formatting tools which, while they mostly work, they don't work 100% of the time. I don't understand why I can't just type out my own HTML. It's easier and much faster.

See, to emphaise "much" in my previous sentence, I had to move one hand from my keyboard to the trackpad, find the cursor and move it up to and click the (non-semantic) "I" button, go back to the keyboard to type the word, then click the button again before continuing to type. Meanwhile, I could have typed "<em></em>" in about one tenth the time with no additional muscle movement.

Looking around a bit I've just noticed a glaring omission from the Vox profile page: No URL fields.

We've got fields for half a dozen instant messengers -- AIM, Yahoo, MSN (does anyone actually use this?), Skype, Jabber (for some reason labeled "Google Talk") -- plus e-mail address, but no web site URLs. Intentional or an oversight? It seems like a pretty obvious thing to forget. Assuming Vox is intended to be a social hub of sorts, I'd expect there to be spaces to list multiple web sites, as well as Flickr usernames and the like.

I've been playing around with Six Apart's newest blogging application, Vox. I'm not in the market for something like this, but it's definitely a step up from LiveJournal and I'd recommend people switch once it's publically available.

In a nutshell, Vox is a Livejournal-like blogging and social networking application. You get the blog and friends lists you get with LJ, plus photos, videos, a book list, and unified tagging and organizing across all different media types. Photos, videos, and book lists are integrated with Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, and more, which makes things even easier. Unlike LiveJournal, you also get human readable URLs so links make much more sense.

Notably missing are trackbacks/pingbacks, but as this is in beta I expect they'll show up eventually. Ditto for some of the clunkiness of the media selector.

One of my original questions about Vox was why it exists at all, why Six Apart didn't just expand Livejournal's feature set until it matches what they're doing here. I thought this might be an indicator that the LJ code base is already pushed as far as it can be and so it was actually easier to start from scratch than to shoehorn more functionality into LJ. After looking around Vox a bit more I now suspect that isn't the reason, but that they want to create something a little more upscale and didn't want to be burdened with the baggage that's attached to the Livejournal name. Time will tell, I suppose.

Vox is still in limited release beta. Accounts are given apparently at random to people who sign up on Six Apart's site.

Edit: Apparently you can't post in HTML, but have to use a JavaScript-powered toolbar to do something as simple as create a link or bold text. There may be an option somewhere I missed, but forcing something like is a pretty big annoyance. Hopefully this is something that will be fixed before the final release.

Edit 2: And it seems the link generator doesn't yet work all that well. The first line of this post is supposed to contain a link to www.vox.com, but while the text is a different color, it's not a clickable link. The second link in this post works fine. This is reproducable; I tried to fix it only to get the same result. Upon viewing the source, I find the reason. The link source lost the href attribute and still has a temporary id:

<a id="temp_id_for_retrieving_inserted_element_15">Vox</a>

Whatever happened to letting people post in plain old text?