Until they move into the construction industry, however, we must content ourselves with their software design skills, such as this gem:
The "Screw your career six ways from Sunday button," a.k.a. the Publish Post button, is carefully placed well away from any button that you might want to use on a repeated basis for other reasons entirely. This layout is cunningly designed for blogging highly contentious posts; the sort where in your draft you might write reminder notes to yourself. Like, say, "Make sure you reference Mike Dood's crappy article on neologisms. Utter bollox!" These notes are, like Tweets from a congressman to female college students, designed to be confidential. You don't want them accidentally distributed to three billion random strangers just because you pushed your finger on the click pad a little too far to the left after that second glass of red wine, for instance. (Yeah, picky I know.) And you'd rather Mike Dood - a colleague in your department - didn't know your true feelings on his work, either. *
Ah, Blogger. Bless. Did James Bond ever have to put up with this sort of crap from Q, I wonder? I don't recall the eject button ever appearing in between the seek button on the radio and the cigarette lighter. Not even on the Lotus Esprit. And I'm sure James would have pointed it out if it had. Not exactly the most robust design, to be honest. ("Ah! Country music! I can't handle that. Let's see what else we can get out here in... Fuuuuuu...!")
* Recovering from accidental publication is as simple as rushing to the Edit Posts page and deleting the offending post, then starting again from scratch now that you have just trashed all your work, all the while praying that not too many people just got e-notified of your new post and managed to see it (and cache it!) before you were able to hit Delete.
Heh. It's happened to me a couple of times. I conciously avoid writing drafts that I wouldn't be happy getting seen, for this reason.
ReplyDeleteWhat's worse is that if you post is on an RSS feed manager like Feedburner, as mine is, revoking the original post doesn't stop it still being out there.
You can tell Feedburner to forget it, but it takes ages to do that. It wastes no time in publishing the original post though.
Whoops, did that go public? It was supposed to be a cathartic writing exercise as recommended by my therapist. I'm supposed to sleep on it, re-read it in the morning and then delete it. Oh well, I guess it's too late now, my trigger-happy index finger got the better of me.
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