Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Blogger Reloaded: Game Expired!

Blogger: 404 - Page not found.  I just spent a lot of work on a created post, using the Blogger interface.  I had links, I had previewed, reviewed, and done everything but spell-checked this handy note about an user experience.  When I clicked "Publish," I landed on a terrifying "your session has expired" window.  Gulp!  But it looks like all I have to do is log-on and it will take me back where I was (whew).  So I do that, and my reward is a nicely-formatted "404 - Page not found". That tears it. A solid half-hour's work completely down the drain.  Now I am really resolved about Blogger Reloaded and its metaphor shear.

I won't be able to recreate that great note while I am feeling so outraged and abused.  I need to go scream, roll-around on the floor, say awful things about every employee of Google, calm down, forgive them, and then create a blogging experience that works.

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Well, I was able to work my way out of it and restart the publishing of my thought-lost-forever Hamiltonian prose.  So I am calmer.  This is indeed just one more demonstration of how the web interface doth not a desktop usability experience make.  The metaphor shear, when it bites you, is sudden and painful.  I would not doubt that the .NET guys are all over this one, especially with click-once installs and smart applications.  (I think this could set a high bar for the Java model that may be unreachable because of Java Nationalism and clinging to the incoherent illusion that there is only one platform and it is Java, not once and everywhere at all.)  Meanwhile, I will need to check it out and see if my remedy could use Mono as an appropriate toolcraft.

Geek note: How'd I get out of the twisty little maze of lost pages and save my precious blog-entry creation?  Glad you asked.  From the 404 message, I used the Back Arrow. That showed me the logon invitation again.  Another Back Arrow got me to a "this page has expired" presentation from Internet Explorer.  Great!!  I carefully clicked "Refresh" and realized that I hadn't crossed my fingers and put on one green sock.  Just the same, I got the request for permission to repost because that was the only way to accomplish the refresh.  I clicked the appropriate response and 'lo! I was at the publish page that tells me my page is being published and it might take a while if I have a large blog.  It showed 0% progress a few times, long enough for me to become anxious wondering if it would be stuck there as happens when Blogger is really busy.  Then it flashed-up 100% and by golly my page was there, even with a correct permalink.  This is a wonderful demonstration of coherence (Not!) so naturally we might want to do some soul-searching about just what that user-experience is that is being designed here.  This reminds me of something that Jerry Brearton would remind me of when we were compatriots in San Jose: If you want to know what your intentions are, look at your results.  Free advice to the folk at Google, assuming they care enough to build something that lasts beyond the Silicon Valley model where the IPO is the end and not the means.

PS: Speaking of metaphor sheer, while looking at the preview of these deathless words, I clicked the "Back" arrow instead of the "close preview" link.  In this case, IE or somebody saved my butt by putting up a dialog box asking me if I really wanted to abandon the entries I had made.  It's just that I won't have that protection when I use Start | Run ... or a shortcut to ask for a web page.  (If this babbling makes no sense, ignore it.  I am talking about a metaphor shear in having a web page unsuccessfully pretend to be a desktop application, that's all.)

PPS: Is it just me or are there really two copies of my thought-to-be-lost post on the recent-entries page even though there is only one authoritative copy here?  No, here's another authoritative copy.  I am not going to explain why the time stamps are so far apart, but it does tell me how long I actually spent on that note, and also how it is later than I think and I better accomplish something else today.  It looks like one could defeat the Blogger name-inventing procedure for creating unique human-readable names for authoritative-post URLs.  I won't try that.  Something to deal with in any Blog authoring tool that invents human-readable long names though.  I think accession numbers of some sort could be blended-in for better results.
posted by Dennis at 5/14/2004 12:17:46 PM