7 posts tagged “vox”

(With apologies to Samuel.)

Hi, I must be going. I'm running into more and more issues that stop me being happy posting here.

• Data ownership

  My other hosted blog is on Tumblr. Unlike Vox, they let you use a custom domain so that you control the URLs. I realise Six Apart make a nice living off doing this with TypePad, and Vox isn't really aimed at the sort of people who care, but I do, so maybe this isn't the right place for me. Related to that:

• Badly documented, badly supported API

  To get my content out of Tumblr, I need use only one API call: /api/read/json, with well-documented paging parameters. In contrast, I've spent several hours grappling with the Atom API that Vox supports, finding it inconsistent, barely-documented, broken, and otherwise infuriating. I dare say eventually I'll manage to liberate all my data, but damnit, it should be easier than this. (If you're lucky, there'll be a follow-up on how I managed to get on, with more technical details, later.)

• Lack of one-click export support

  ... in fact, it should be that easy. I believe Blogger may recently have added this; certainly Pownce had to when they were acquired and shut down. I don't want to wait until a crisis point, though; I want backups of my content as and when. The recent loss of JournalSpace and AOL Homepages show you can never be too paranoid.

• The HTML editor still doesn't work in Safari

  Well, it's better than it was; instead of locking up your browser, it does now allow you to post. Unfortunately, it also inserts loads of random tags that mess up formatting when I come to copy the entry to anywhere else

• Even in Camino, the WYSIWYG editor can mangle things
• There's no raw view, which makes fixing the editor's bad HTML even harder
• The best bits are now in Movable Type's UI

  When I started using Vox, I still had Movable Type 2.6 on my personal site. I still do, but I have a version of 4.1 or something on my laptop, and at some point (probably sooner rather than later, now) I'll deploy it to husk.org proper. A lot of the niceties of the interface in Vox are replicated over there.

  (Meanwhile, Six Apart still shuffle backwards and forwards on whether MT is free or not. I think for my uses, it's definitely free as in beer, but I can choose between whether I have a copy that's free as in speech or not. Sigh.)

• Lack of control over page design

  Editing a header image and choosing from some (admittedly pretty) backgrounds is a bit poor when you compare it to Tumblr. Sorry.

• No stats/analytics

  Even Flickr has stats now, and Tumblr lets you add in Google Analytics to your HTML.

• The UI feels too "heavy"

  When I started using Vox, it felt nice and simple compared to that MT 2.6 editing screen. Since then, however, we've seen Tumblr, Twitter and ffffound, where the posting interface is a simple text box, bookmarklet, or similarly stripped-down. Editing on Vox feels like it's a battle far too often.

• There's no feeling of community / not a one-stop shop

  Vox feels like it was intended to fix some of the issues with LiveJournal and the isolated blogging of MT and TypePad, but sadly it never hit critical mass. Similarly, the idea of allowing users to upload all their stuff was a nice idea, but it doesn't seem to have worked out, for me anyway. (Once again, Tumblr does both of these right, for me anyway.)

• It's not going anywhere

  I don't know what Six Apart's focus is, but Vox definitely doesn't feel like it's part of it. While I'll continue to watch them with interest, it feels like a lot of the work that's been going on hasn't really had any useful impact over the last couple of years.

I'm not going to give up posting; as I said above, I do have a Movable Type installation I'll be reverting to, and I'll continue reading what my friends and neighbours have to post. However, I don't feel comfortable posting here any more. Sorry.

One of the (often flagged) problems with the way things are done these days - web 2.0, if you must - is that people end up reliant on other people's services. You may not have noticed, but the front page of husk.org now takes content from this feed, along with various other places where I'm active online, and aggregates them into a single stream.

This has all been working fine, but sometime recently - on Friday, I think - Vox decided that their feeds would default to excerpt-only, and they've also added a bunch of invitation cruft ("Send to a friend", that sort of thing) to each entry. It was easy enough - once I noticed - to swap back to the full feed, but cutting out the extra lines of HTML is a bit trickier, although I'm sure I'll manage. (I'll try to take the opportunity to add a touch of styling I've been meaning to do for ages).

I'm slightly annoyed that none of this was mentioned in the Team Vox release notes entry, but there you go. (I don't like the proliferation of "share" buttons either, but Vox are obviously trying to be "easy to use", and Flickr's gone down that road too, with "email this page " and "save to delicious" links, so one day I'll just get used to it and stop kvetching.) I suppose what I really need, though, is a script that alerts me every time the feeds change, and - this would be cleverer - if they change format significantly. Sigh. More work.

We now return to your previously scheduled lack of content. Probably.

Getting the previous post out was more of a nightmare than I'd have thought.

I've started aggregating my Vox posts, delicious links and Flickr photos with my old MT install over at husk.org. Generally this has gone pretty well, but I hit a nasty edge case when I came to drag my post advocating not-SLRs out of draft hell. Originally I sketched the article's outline in November of last year, but I was able to use the Edit Date widget to pull it to the present, and once I'd finished it, it appeared in the right place on the Vox page.

(Actually, this was also an annoyance. To do so, I had to manually click through five months and find today's date. It'd be nice if there was a "today" link somewhere to make this process easier. If it could use the current time, too, that'd be even better.)

Unfortunately, when the time came to regenerate husk.org's front page from the Atom feed, it was nowhere to be seen. A bit of digging in XML and code later, and I realised that the issued property for the XML::Atom::Entry object was still set to November; the modified date was what had changed to today. A swift edit later and I was sorting on modified instead, but then any entry that had even a minor edit to i would move forward in time. Scratch that idea, then.

In the end the fix I decided on was to delete the original entry, and recreate it afresh, so that the issued date was today. However, it seems that this is what Vox should be doing: editing the date on the compose screen should modify the Atom issued property, not the modified one. It would certainly have saved me a bit of work.

Ironically, after going to the London Vox meet and saying that I used it because I felt more able to write here than elsewhere - something that's still true, but that I'm also still not able to explain - I seem to have run into the buffers here as well. So this is kind of filler. Sorry about that.

Speaking of the Vox meet, it was good. The bar wasn't the nicest in the world, but there were lots of goodies and plenty of people to talk to. I made a beeline for "the photo table", where the 350D owners seemed to have congregated, but later actually did reasonably well at the "mingling" thing (which is usually a problem for me: at London.pm I always talk to the same people, for example). Eventually I might post photos, but this week's been busy. Thanks to the organisers, and the 6A entourage who made it there.

At least it's nearly the weekend.

There's a Seven Deadly Sins meme going around at the moment, and after one of my friends did it, I thought I would too. I wasn't intending to publish the full result, but I pasted it into Vox to see how it coped. After a prompt ("would you like to convert this?" - I said "yes" *) I ended up with a table in the compose page, which I could edit down to just this:

I was pleasantly surprised that it was possible (although a little unclear: the button you want is the "x" in the circle) to remove rows. There's also undo/redo, the ability to size rows, and you can edit the text in fields.

Unfortunately, I can't see a way to create a table other than a two-pass edit, putting in HTML then letting Vox convert it. Nonetheless, I'm pretty impressed.

* This was the only slightly iffy part. I didn't read the dialog very closely, but it seemed unclear what the other option did. Presumably it would have displayed raw HTML to people. I should go back and check this.

On Monday evening, I was poking around with various APIs trying to configure Flickr to post photos to Vox. Now, the former claims to be able to post to the Atom API, and Vox claims to have one, but when I configured it and tried to test post I got an uninformative error.

Delving deeper, I broke out XML::Atom, the Perl library - originally by the CTO of Six Apart, now maintained by one of their technical folk - and tried a trivial test post, not unlike this example in Ben Hammersley's book. It didn't work either, with the somewhat baffling error "200 OK".

Doing more research, it seems that a lot of clients - Ecto, for example - have trouble with Vox. There is an internal Six Apart project for a Mac OS X based TypePad/Vox uploader, called Fence, but it's not finished, and doesn't work with 10.3. After a bit of headscratching, I decided I'd need to spend far more time than I have to figure out what was up, and left it.

This morning I discovered that Flickr have explicitly added Vox as a supported blog type. This just confirms to me that there's something odd about Vox's Atom API. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by this: it's got nowhere near the adoption or longevity of the competing XML-RPC weblog APIs, and only a couple of months ago Anil Dash noted that it was still niche: "the Atom API hasn't gotten finalized in the way that feed format did" and "Atom will probably show up somewhat later in new tools using blogging APIs".

So, Team Vox, one thumb up for Flickr picture posting, since my earlier complaint about posting is now void, but one thumb waggling uncertainly, since the Atom API is obviously - to use the apparently industry standard term - "funky". Here's hoping it gets sorted out soon.

Here's a little hack that I inadvertantly found yesterday while editing my post on cameras. You may have noticed that the last part of the post's URL (I use the word "slug" for this, because I think that's what most personal CMSes call it) is different to the post title. Here's how to do that.

• Start a post. Put in the title field the text you want in the slug.
• Remember that Vox will automatically change uppercase to lowercase and replace spaces with dashes
• Save the post, making sure that "view this" is set to "you only (draft)"
• On the result page, click on "Go back and edit this post"
• Put in the title you actually want
• Edit your post, and when you're ready, save it with the desired view (eg "the world (public)").

This is admittedly a lot of effort, and I don't suppose that many people will care, but I thought I'd mention it for the perfectionists in the audience.