A close up of a refrigerator

I have just discovered the blog of Blogonautes without much interest , a directory of blogs operating on subscription and listing to date a little more than 20,000 entries. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much in terms of content, meta blogging – those blogs that talk about blogs that talk about blogs that … – bothers me deeply. On that side, I was not particularly disappointed. Browse through these websites and play interactive casino games at g bcity-w.com .Visiting a blog opened in the second half of 2006 and supposed to be aware of the most widespread technologies in terms of blog hosting, I remain devastated by the user experience of this site:

Pop-ups are sooo 1997 …

The user does not like being forced to hand, this is nothing new, and he feels assaulted when a site forces him to open a link in a new window without asking his opinion. If he wishes to return or stay on the source page, he will open a new window or a new tab on his own; if it does not do so, it is because it does not consider it appropriate to maintain direct access to the original page. As a reminder, one of the credo of “web 2.0” claims the enhancement of the user …

We can deceive once a thousand people but we cannot deceive …

Under each post there are three links: “Permalink”, “Read comments (x)” and “Write a comment”. Oddly, no trackback URL; we would have liked. The most natural reflex leads the visitor to click on the link indicating the number of comments in order to read them or respond to the post. And here is the drama ; if the comments do appear on the screen under the original post, you must on the other hand click on a second link to access the response form which opens … in a pop-up. If I choose to click on the link titled Write a comment , I get the same nasty pop-up but without the ability to view comments already posted. Read or write, you have to choose!

What is conceived well is clearly stated …

Another bad surprise: neither Flock nor Firefoxdo not agree to open the Blogonauts pop-up without explicit authorization from me. Embarrassing as all that, and I do so in the legitimate fear of seeing popping up before my horrified eyes a hundred pop-up windows winding me with a whole bunch of licentious sites. The form includes 6 text fields where 4 would be more than enough, two radio buttons and a checkbox. The identification part is tiny, so much so that neither the url of this site nor my name nor my e-mail address fit in full. They could benefit a little more from the width of the window, which thus offers too much “white”. The caption “text” placed next to the input field is superfluous as it is obvious that this is where the comment must be written. Under the identification area, there is a “Comment Title” field that nothing differentiates from the previous three. The presence of such a field is more than debatable, not to say that it has nothing to do there. The comment box is also tiny, and forces the writer of prose longer than two lines to use a text editor. Below the text box is a hugecapcha , easily covering two-thirds of the area above. A capcha is a system intended to control that the author of the comment is not a bot by making him enter numbers and letters inscribed in a randomly generated image, which does not bring Blogonauts within the reach of the blind and visually impaired . This system has nothing to do there and should only be displayed if there is any doubt as to the nature of the commentator. Finally, a “Remember me” checkbox is curiously inserted between the capcha and the button to send the comment.

Criticism is easy but art is difficult

How can you simply improve the experience on this blog? Only one link should be left leading to the comments. A “leave a response” link between the content of the post and the first comment would allow the visitor to skip the responses already left to go to the response form left at the bottom of the page. Navigation would be much more intuitive and pleasant; the user would not be forced to open a new window and if necessary to fight with its anti pop-up. The labels “name”, “email” and “URL” would be much better aligned properly to the right of the corresponding input fields. This would take up the empty space above entering the comment. We could then have much larger input fields. A label ” A trackback URL would replace it advantageously. The “Remember me” checkbox should be under the identification area and not under the A trackback URL would replace it advantageously. The “Remember me” checkbox should be under the identification area and not under theovercame . A good antispam using capchas only as a last resort would have greatly improved the use of the response form, and was a minimum to expect from a “modern” hosting platform, even more when ‘it is about hosting a site that wants to be the observatory of French-speaking blogs (sic). And for the sake of conscience, before closing my windows, I passed the site for syntax validation – without much hope – and it obviously does not validate, with 47 errors on a single page.