Reflections on Vox

Okay, I’ve only just started playing with Vox so these will be more negative than positive, and on the whole kinda niggly. Also remember Vox is still in “preview” so things I’m missing might turn up later.

No HTML option. Entries posted with HTML, such as links and bold, will be displayed as raw code. You have to put in hyperlinks and styles within the Compose window by clicking on buttons. The arguments for this being a good thing are reasonable but it’d be nice to have the option to switch to raw HTML (as I believe Blogger does), if only so I can run the post through an external spell checker. Also that Compose page is kinda annoying, but then I’m used to something different.

Tags on blog posts – I’m really not convinced by this. I get where it’s coming from but its going to take a bit of getting used to. Tags are for photos, because photos don’t have words. Blog posts already have words.

[This Is Good] – If I was still participating in the FleePlii community then I might be pissed off about Andre letting this go mainstream, but I haven’t been in there for years and, to be honest, every blog system should have this sort of thing by default.

Notifications – As far as I can see there’s no way to get external notifications of comments posted and the like. LiveJournal emails this sort of thing. I expect this to come. [Later: They do send email notifications of comments - they just went into my spam folder, which is not Vox's fault of course.]

Icon – Kinda confusing upload system. I had to load it into my photo library which seemed like unnecessary duplication.

Privacy – This was my main reason for trying out Vox – the desire to write in varying degrees of privacy and to limit who could comment on my writings. Currently you can specify Neighbours, Friends and Family in the same way as Flickr does. I was kinda hoping for a more granular system whereby you could put people into groups and then allow those groups to read certain posts. So, for example, person A could be in my Comics Chums group and my Birmingham Chums group while person B would just be in the Comics group. In real life I have many different social groups to whom I communicate in different ways and it’d be cool if this could be reflected on Vox.

Design – Ooh, I really want to tweak the blog design. Yes, this is in my nature but remember user-customization is cited as one of the main reasons for MySpace’s success. The problem with a limited selection is the plain ones all look the same and the decorated ones are too specific. There must be a middle ground between rigid formality and the chaos of MySpace. To be honest I’d be happy with a really basic layout if I can’t do anything with it.

Feeds – It might seem obvious, but the RSS feed for Vox blogs doesn’t include private posts. But LiveJournal allows you to read Friends Only posts via RSS with a little bit of hackery (use http://username:password@www.livejournal.com/users/journal/data/rss?auth=digest) so it shouldn’t be too hard to port this over.

Flickr Integration – I’m assuming the ability to post from inside Flickr will come in time.

Adverts – This could be the killer for me. They’re just Google ads but they feel really intrusive and I’m sure I’ll get sick of seeing Ashton Kutcher’s bloody name every time I look at my blog. This’ll be the first time I’ve considered using AdBlock on Google ads. At least they’re at the bottom of the page though.

At the end of the day most of these issues stem from my having had complete and total control over my blogging experience and Vox is the polar opposite of that. It’s my intention to use Vox for a type of writing I don’t normally do (thanks to this blog being wide open to the world). Right now there doesn’t seem to be much difference between it and LJ, but since they’re both owned by Six Apart I can’t imagine this staying that way.

One thing that really struck me was how it felt like Flickr For Words but in a good way. I’d like to see more Flickry features like being able to add posts to groups (yes you can do this with tags but it’s hard to build a community around tags) and so on. One of the motivations for Vox seems to be to reclaim that spirit of community that existed in the old days of blogging before it all went wanky after 9/11. Mimicing Flickr would pretty much achieve that.

I’m going to stick with Vox at least until it launches properly (if anything launches properly these days…) but you won’t be able to read most of what I’ve written unless I add you to my network, which I might not do, and you have to be in Vox to begin with which is kinda hard right now. It’s nothing personal!