October 24, 2006
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Boost + Tags
Ok, so much experimentation with boost later, I think it’s a better way to read random Xanga stuff than simply going to random sites. First of all it’s categorized by whoever did the nomination. Secondly, it’s also passed the threshhold of being boosted by someone, so it’s just one notch better than random. Plus if you get something inane, you can rate it at -2. W00t.
The main downside is that it doesn’t work with Safari. Which is a pretty big downside for me. I’ve used Firefox to do the boost routine, which works fine.
And the reason it won’t work is this: Someone has to spend a bunch of time looking at random Xanga stuff to rate it before the ‘boost’ becomes meaningful. And frankly, most of Xanga isn’t worth the time. It’s interesting in a sociology kind of sense, seeing what’s on the minds of a kerjillion teenagers who boost each other to be nice, but that charm wears off pretty quickly.
As for tags: Let’s say you’ve tagged a bunch of stuff over the last few months. You click on a tag in your ‘tag cloud,’ and see a few older articles. You realize you want to add a tag to one of those articles, but how? If you click through to the article, you’re at the read/comment page, which doesn’t let you edit the entry. The only way to add a tag to the article that’s staring you in the face is to go to the posting calendar thing and put in the proper date. Then you can click on ‘edit’ and add tags.
Useability: It’s what’s for breakfast.
Update: This entry being edited with sean’s super-spiff ‘bookmarklet.’ See comments.
Comments (6)
I whipped up a bookmarklet that will let me edit the entry I’m looking at, without having to navigate to it from the blog page… let’s see if Xanga will let me post it here…
Edit this entry
dammit
here
Hey, cool. Works in Safari.
noice
We built Boost with those concerns in mind. After Matt and I (the developers) left for school, Xanga hasn’t had a chance to get boost 1) officially launched and 2) linked in a more prominent location. It *should* be the case that way more people are rating things than nominating them, but — no surprise — that pattern is reversed because we haven’t put up any links for those who simply want to go check out stuff in the queue.
When activity spikes up, the real Boost algorithms will start to kick in. You should notice that stuff in the live boost queues will be more interesting on average, and the stuff on the results pages will be of higher quality than they are now.
The categories are largely to help you find content in categories you’re interested in — and it will also act as a kind of age+interest filter, too.
But keep an eye out for the day Boost goes official, and see how you feel about it when it’s really starting to tear through nominations at a faster clip. I’ve been talking with the guys… It should be any day now.
Comments are closed.