Vox
Okay, so now I have a Vox account. I admit that I got it primarily because I wanted to reserve 'Elkins,' a name that tends to go fast. (I didn't manage to snag it on Livejournal, nor on Gmail, so I thought that I'd better hustle if I wanted to reserve it on Vox.) 'Skelkins' isn't the worst username in the world, I suppose, but it always reminds me of Skeletor, and honestly, if I'm going to be associated with some 1980s cartoon villain, I'd much rather it be Cobra Commander.



I realize that this system is still in beta, but I'm already finding myself hoping that people won't wind up migrating over there from LJ. I don't think that I like it very much. For one thing, every last page on the entire damned site gives me a horizontal scroll-bar. Fixed width? Fixed width that averages at over twenty words of text a line? What kind of crappy web design is that? Furthermore, there's no way to modify even my own blog to make it suitable for viewing on my equipment. Do you have any idea how tiny and unreadable everything becomes for me if I turn my screen resolution up above 800 x 600? Have mercy, Six Apart! Some of us are both old and poor!

I'm not too fond of the rigidity of the site overall. I've become accustomed to having some ability to customize things [1], but it seems that there's very little on Vox that the users are allowed to tinker with. I'm hoping that perhaps that's something they intend to address once the system is out of beta: if nothing else, it would be really nice to be able to apply personalized CSS sheets to the layouts.

The text editor is also rather a nuisance. It doesn't accept HTML. At all. Instead, there are these cute little buttons that you're supposed to click on to do various things. This is extremely annoying. For one thing, like most so-called "user friendly" systems, it's totally counter-intuitive (why do computer nerds always assume that we Luddites will find pressing random buttons an easier way to accomplish things than typing? Using a keyboard is not an obscure skill! Really! It's not!). For another, it means that I can't type something up in Notepad ahead of time and then just cut'n'paste it into the little box, because there's no way for me to do the mark-up off-site. Of course, some might say that this is all for the best—I do tend to go overboard with my italics—but it's still a right pain in the ass.

Also—and I do know how very petty this sounds—I just fucking hate the word 'blog.' Always have, and at this point, I'm beginning to suspect that I always will.

The photo hosting looks pretty nifty, though, as does some of the multi-media stuff. And I think that the "Collections" function, which allows you to associate a group of items of diverse media (posts, images, books, sound files, video), is very cool. It seems to me that it would be an ideal way to put together an on-line travelogue, or a running account of any long-term project with a heavy visual or multimedia element. I also appreciate how easy they've made it to insert images into posts: unlike basic HTML tags, inserting images into text in a way that looks halfway decent is actually not easy coding for Luddites to learn, so the WYSIWYG editor does seem like a real improvement there.

I also like the ability to call up all recent posts on the system which have been assigned a particular tag. That's how tagging really ought to work on a closed system. Sadly, I suspect that if Vox ever becomes as enormous as Livejournal, it will quickly become too unwieldy to be of much practical use, just like Technorati and del.icio.us have become.

Finally, I think that the comments system is a fantastic improvement over Livejournal's. It is, in fact, everything that I've always wanted LJ's comments to be. Not only does the blog sidebar have a "Recent Comments" section, but you can also keep an eye on all threads on which you have yourself commented throughout the site. Once you have commented on someone else's blog, you are provided with a list of all subsequent comments to that same item, allowing you to follow the conversation. That's precisely the feature that I've always wanted to see on Livejournal, not least of which because it does away with the hideous redundancies of LJ's threading system. Now if only they built in email notifications to that particular feature, Vox's commenting system would be just about perfect, IMO.

Anyway, I have no idea what, if anything, I might end up using the Vox account for, but at least now I've staked my claim.


1 Which reminds me. I hate this journal's layout. I think I shall do something with it, and in the meantime revert to plain, nice soothing Refried Paper. [back]