13 posts tagged “vox”
I love Vox. It has been classy, stylish, and easy from the beginning. It was just the sort of no-nonsense, batteries-included blogging service I needed three years ago. But I have been getting antsy about the difficulty of getting my data out of Vox should I need to. As it is now official that the export feature has been abandoned, and none of the exporting systems out on the web have worked for me, I made my own.
python voxrssget.py yourvoxname
All it does is page through the HTML files of your yearly archives and scrapes out stuff that looks like posts. If it runs into XML errors, as it did on one of my pages, it gives up and moves on, then complains to you at the end. You will have to copy over that page's posts yourself.
None of my recent posts seem to have made it over to LJ.
Hey, it just occurred to me that Vox does the right thing when it comes to pronouns in user interfaces! Instead of muddling about and mixing up the way it refers to the user (like Windows' "My Documents" versus "Which type of installation do you want"), you are always you. These days even Apple gets this wrong sometimes.
Okay. I’m still flailing around a bit with my LiveJournal and Vox blogs, but for now I think I’ll try this: That should get me everything I want from posting. I should even be able to blog fairly easily from iPhone. The remaining problems are: I’m simultaneously grateful and vexed that hachi gave me a permanent LJ account; I should take advantage of its coolness, but it’s challenging to get it to fit into my blogging habits without abandoning my nice Voxy lifestyle. >:P
Here's a dynamic embedded version of my bouquet, thanks to the new beta "embed" feature in Vox. Neat! I hope we can eventually put this type of stuff in the sidebar.
I'm kind of interested in evaluating LiveJournal as my main blogging service, to avoid ads, because my friend is on the LiveJournal team, because I could get full composing functionality in OmniWeb, and because there are more geeky tools available. If cross-posting whole entries works properly, that will help me a lot. Let's see how this post looks on my LJ.
If you try to close the Vox Compose page while you have unsaved changes, you get a handy dialog that asks if you really want to go away. But the UI of it is kind of unpleasant:
There are six things going on here:
- A big Firefox icon — This doesn't help. It's actually kind of misleading, because this makes it seem like Firefox generated the message. This is Firefox's fault, not Vox's.
- Confirm — Okay, it has the word Confirm at the top, for some reason. This doesn't get me any closer to understanding what's going on. It just says Confirm.
- Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page? — A question. The problem hasn't really been presented yet, so I can't really come up with a meaningful answer yet.
- You have unsaved changes. Are you sure you want to leave? — Aha, there's the problem. And the same question again, worded slightly differently. Okay, now I know what the problem is, kind of (I don't know whether I'll be able to retrieve my changes if I come back later), and I know what kind of decision I have to make.
- Press OK to continue, or Cancel to stay on the current page. — Danger! If I just read the first half of this sentence, I'll press OK, to "continue" editing my post. Whoops! It actually meant to continue leaving.
- Cancel and OK buttons — I don't know if this is possible in JavaScript alerts, but you should really, really label buttons with the actions they represent. If I have to look back and forth between the message and the buttons to figure out which button does what, I'll just get confused. There's a reason buttons have labels: it's so we can find out what they do!
The alert icon is stolen from OmniWeb, but I don't feel too bad since I made it in the first place. :D
What do you think? Is it better? The rewording is certainly possible; I don't know whether JavaScript has access to the icon or the button labels. But if not, could they make their own pop-up in the page itself, like most other interfaces at Vox?
I don't mean any ill will to Vox; I'm just playing. The interfaces around here are pretty great, so I thought I'd point out a way things could get even better.
I'm pretty glad I switched to Vox from Hatena Diary. It's quite a bit closer to what I want in a bloggy type of blog.
Apple's Genius Bar replaced my MacBook's discolored topcase today, and it seems that a new keyboard and trackpad came with it. The keys and mouse button feel just a bit different than they did before. I had to rearrange all of the keys from Qwerty to Dvorak again.
I finished Stumbling on Happiness and dove right into my next book.
Stumbling on Happiness was informative and nice to read, but it was too unnecessarily whimsical in a kind of random way I don't think I appreciated as much as I was supposed to.
Tomorrow I'm driving down to Portland to see Richard Dawkins! Woop!
