After posting a few times on Vince’s blog and seeing the new WordPress interface, I decided an upgrade was in order. And indeed, it was a beneficial upgrade. The RSS feed is now fixed (a bonus for all you whiners who complained but offered no guidance to help fix it. =P Also why my blog postings are showing up on Facebook lately, if you were curious).
More important, though (at least for the writer): They’ve incorporated the image uploading into the “Write Post” window. Great!! My process before involved opening two windows, and copying from one into another to get the images set up in my post. Now I have this handy image module in the same window that I use for writing:
I wasted no time in using it to upload some images. But then all I got was this…
Well, yeah… that’s definitely my image. And doesn’t it blow your mind that the image is of the image uploader which is holding an image of the image uploader? It’s like an infinite mirror thing!
Anyway, what do I do now? Where’s the code that I can paste into my post? Yeah, I could write my own image tag, but in the spirit of laziness, I spent five minutes trying to figure out how the thing worked. How does it work, you ask? Well, apparently the image is clickable.
No real affordances for clicking, but that’s OK. I’m more concerned with what this is supposed to be telling me. “Using Thumbnail?” Does that mean I’m currently using the thumbnail, or I should click it to use the thumbnail? (In the past 10 minutes I’ve found that it can mean both).
Same thing with “Not Linked” – apparently that conveys its current status as not linked… and you can link it to an image or to a page. But if I link to an image, which image would that be? Does it link to the larger image? What if I use the larger image from the start? Does it link back to the thumbnail?
Ultimately, it’s an improvement over what I was using, so I’m not complaining too loudly. Just blogging… semi-loudly.
infinite mirror image… trippy…
Usability is about seeking the best interface we can make, so if I think it can be better, then yeah… I’ll complain. :)
I’m only one user, but I actually was pretty quick to add an image in one tab of Safari and then paste the code into my blog. That was smooth, and exactly what I wanted. The same thing in the same window would be more ideal without sacrificing the familiarity.
My big issue lately is that I want the same editor that I had before – smart text that I could mark up with HTML as needed. In trying to be fancy and obvious, the new version is making a lot of assumptions that I don’t want.
And where the hell is my ALT text!!!!
Ok, usability-man. The text descriptions aren’t as descriptive as they could be, but within that small space can you really complain? Plus, it does its job well. Once you use it once, you know exactly how to use it and it’s a smooth go. Is that so bad?
Crybaby.
Are you still using the optional “visual rich” editor? I hated it. Under Users>Your Profile there’s a checkbox that turns it off giving you the standard html editor.
P.S. It automagically uses whatever you type in as the title for the ALT text.
So what was trippy was that I had the standard HTML editor for the first few posts – and then it started doing the “visual rich” editor. Did I change anything? Nope. So where would I change it back? Don’t know. But I’m a fan of the regular old editor, thanks for the tip.
I think it did the same thing for me. I remember I messed around with the regular editor and when I came back the next day I was all WTF mate? Eventually I found the button to turn it off.
Weird. It’s not a perfect program, but it’s open source, so you can fix it! I dare you!