teh TODDtastic webLog-a-majig

I love Hulu.com, but lately it seems they have some capacity problems. I guess it can be taken as a sign of rapid growth, which is good. However, I find myself constantly having to pause and wait a few minutes for the buffer to fill up. I hope they get that fixed soon.

Edit: On second thought here…. It might be that my ISP is throttling things. Time Warner… the sucky service millions are forced to use.

I’m working on giving back the the people by providing an easy, free over-the-air host for blackberry apps.

The site is http://www.otadrop.com

So far, I don’t have much there, but with time I will. I am currently working on the back-end. It’s going to be all database driven, so it’ll be nice and dynamic. If I have the time, I will also make it so you have to login and such to drop an OTA package.

In the mean time, if you need an OTA package hosted… just let me know. I’ll be glad to host it until I get the site up and running.

Back when the new Facebook came around… I wrote an entry saying why it sucked (see #3 and #7). I noticed they added a lot of white space which would eventually be filled with more ads.

Well… when the new Facebook came around… it had a total of 2 over in that white space I mentioned. Now there are 3. Not a big deal… but it does show a 50% growth. And it does show that I was right in calling that the added white space was for future ad space. They also added ads to the gray box on your Home screen. I thought they would add them under that gray box… but instead they added it in the box! Now that white space under that gray box is REALLY wasteful.

Beyond that…. I still find most things on that orignal list annoying. Applications mostly piss me off now…. NONE OF THEM WORK!

And I’ve seen hardly any effort by Facebook to improve these retarded design elements. It’s rather sad if you really examine their design. I absolutely think they can do a lot better.

Oh well.

Why did it take so long for me to discover Pandora???

This service is awesome! I have been rocking it all day today and I really think it is the ultimate internet radio ever!

For those that don’t know, this service is very simple. Basically, you give it a starting point… this can be a song or an artist. From there, it picks out songs for you that you probably will like. If you don’t, simply click the thumbs-down button and it will remember that you don’t like it. And if you particularly like a song, you can click the thumbs-up button, and it will learn from that.

And the best part is that you can use the service anywhere there is internet! Also….. it is ad free…. and has no cost! You can pay them a whopping $36/year if you want to support them…. which is practically pocket change for a service like this. If I’m still impressed in a few weeks… I maybe actually pay for this…. it’s awesome!

But… I’ve only been using it for less than a day. Hopefully it doesn’t disappoint me.

Check it out if you haven’t yet!

Dear Facebook,

What you have done is very hurtful. You’ve taken a site that I’ve always loved using since the beginning… and turned it into, pardon the french, complete shit. The new layout you have spent months developing is honestly an embarrassment. As a web developer, I can appreciate all the work that has gone into the back end and such, but the front end is, as as they say, “Epic fail.” I know a lot of people say this without specific reason, but I will spell out some of the specific problems with the new layout.

1. While tabs are a great idea for keeping pesky applications out of sight, the execution on this was awful. Putting the info section on a separate tab is extremely inconvenient. Moreover, the tab labeled “Wall” is NOT my wall. You’ve taken the very well accepted definition of the wall and completely destroyed it. I can not even see the entire wall anymore… so there goes going back and reading old wall posts. I can’t even get a number of how many wall posts I have! I actually made a goal this year to get up to 1000 wall posts… and I was well on the way to this… but now I will never know. Thanks for ruining my little goal… and one of the entire “coolness” factors on facebook. And while STILL on the subject of the tabs… the tab named “Boxes” is completely undefined. I do not know what that means. I’m still trying to figure out why you would ever call that tab “Boxes.” I think it is some sort of Applications tab… but I might be wrong. Maybe you’re trying to change the name of the applications to “boxes” for some unknown, pointless, and unreasonable reason.
2. Good job wasting so much more space with the status updates. Not only is it listed at the top of my profile…. but there is also a separate larger font box for updating it! Apparently, clicking it to change it on the spot was not good enough.
3. Good job making it blatantly obvious that this remake was intended to bring MORE ADS! to Facebook. I understand that you need to have sponsors… but what was wrong with keeping them under an existing column where they were actually out of the way. Now they have their own column on the page… that happens to really make it look like a lot of space is wasted further down in the page. It makes me want to write a script to change that so that I can gain that space back, thank you very much.
4. The varying font sizes and indentations on this new “Wall”/mini feed/wtf thing is nauseating. I think I’m finally starting to see some pattern to it… but I don’t like it. Having status, feed items, wall posts, comments, and everything else you felt like throwing into this creation really sucks. There is so much going on with it that I have to take extra time to figure it out before I start parsing what info it tries to provide.
5. Back to those application, or boxes, or whatever you want to call them. I have an idea! What if were were able to put some of our favorite ones on our main tab!? What is our main tab? What comes up when people click on my profile? Sometimes when I click on peoples profiles I just get the “Info” tab, and other times I get there “Wall” tab. (Don’t even think about making that consistent). While I do hate most applications (when you guys launched those I knew it was trouble brewing), some of them are rather tame and I would actually want people to see them when they come to my page. But now… I actually have to hope they decide or want to click on my “Boxes” tab. Thanks. Now I can’t promote my blog posts with ease. Or have a “Box” for my rss feed presented to people.
6. It took me literally 30 minutes to find my groups. I almost thought you got rid of groups! Then… I randomly noticed that at the bottom, next to some Start Menu type thing, that there is a little icon for groups! Thanks. Now there isn’t a list of my groups on my profile. You’ve completely taken the idea of the profile and ripped it apart to something I would be embarrassed to release if I developed for Facebook.
7. Again with the wasting space. On the Home screen, there is a grey box on the right side… that is too wide for its purpose… and when that box is done… under it is just a bunch of white space. (That’d be a great place for ads, maybe. Just kidding.)
8. I randomly have some stupid “Application Feeds” on the Home Screen… under an arrow tab. Best thing, though… I can’t get rid of these feeds! I don’t know where they came from… and I can’t get rid of them!
9. I love how you half ass-ly put the latest 3 status updates at the top of the News Feed. No options for maybe how many of the latest status updates we want to see… no mixing it randomly in with everything else (the general theme of this new layout). Nope… just randomly placing it there as if it was an after thought that we might want to see the latest 3 updates. Like in the old, yes… but if I remember correctly, when you were only testing this new layout, those 3 latest status updates were not there. So… it was an after thought.
10. How wide does the birthday list have to be? If I had to guess… a nice random number of 318 pixels. That may or may not be the actual number of pixels. And… 207 of those pixels are wasted grey space to the right of this list. If I do the math… that works out to actually only needing 111 pixels for this list. To make it a more normal number… we might go ahead and stretch it to… say… 150 pixels. Sorry, I notice these things as a web developter. This also translates to those 318 horizonal pixels being completely under this grey box on the Home screen.
11. Back to the Profile… apparently when we go to the “Boxes” tab… we no longer want that panel on the left with our picture and other Info. We do however want that on the “Info” and the “Wall” tabs. Where is the option for that?
12. The light colors make everything seem…. blurry or hazzy. Interesting. Perhaps a reference to the design itself.

This is just what I could come up with in about 20 minutes. Facebook… I seriously hate the new layout. Trust me, I can add so much more to this list. I am begging you to switch it back and perhaps try again. I am seriously hurt by your complete lack of listening to the users of your site. I have repeatedly left my feedback on the shit you’ve come up with… and it seems my suggestions went unheard. I am eagerly awaiting the next big social network… ready to switch at any time. I switched to facebook for its very nice, clean, minimal design. But I see it is just becoming bloated and corrupt; adding more focus to ads, not caring what the users want, and creating a completely disorganized layout.

Thanks.

–Todd

Last night I completed a brand new theme for VMHero’s site. I’m very pleased with the new look! Check it out!

So… last month when I got a reminder to renew my domain name (toddtastic.com), I decided to go ahead and also get the hugely unique domain of toddmarimon.com. So… I’m not sure what to do with it. Right now… it actually tells you go to away. What I’m currently envisioning (pending the time to do it) is to make that my website and making toddtastic.com be fully dedicated to my blog (even though it mostly is already). It would be an opportunity for me to actually make a website for myself (not just a blog like what we have here). It would also show a more professional side of me, complete with resume (hire me!) and work samples.

My other thought is … I don’t know. I need more ideas. I’m open to a complete restructuring outline for my two domain names.

Leave comments with your ideas!