bloglines freedbacking

Tags: bloglines

Billy Bob (152.163.37.102) -

From bloglines news:

"You might have noticed a few fancy little changes we've made to your feed tree on the left pane today. You'll like them even more when you learn what's behind the scenes!"

I think you changed the font in the left column... from something comfortable to something strange... I'm sure I'll get used to it.. but what is wrong with generally using the default font?

I see that ugly yellowing blinking as I type this now... why do you need crap to be animated and flashing? If I am reading the feeds I want to read the feeds not be distracted by crap moving, flashing or changing to the left!

Aside... I stopped using one computer distibutor because they put so many animated .GIFs on their product pages you couldn't concentrate enough to read the specifications of anything!

• The Wizard Behind the Curtains

Comment #1 Ben Lowery (69.118.226.174) -

Hi Billy Bob,

I'm an engineer at Bloglines, the one responsible for the UI changes to the left column. First off, just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to write up your feedback and post it. It helps us a ton to know what folks like and don't like about the site.

The font on the left hand pane did change a bit, it's now slightly smaller. We had a lot of feedback that the font was a bit too big, but obviously this cuts both ways. As for the flashing yellow, during the development of the new tree, we found that just updating the tree confused users; many folks wanted to know what changed. We're most likely going to add a user preference to turn off the yellow flash and change or disable the automatic refresh of the counts for the left column. I'm sure we'll announce it on the Bloglines News blog when it goes live. Would that adequately address your concerns?

Thanks again for writing up your feedback, hope to have some good news for you soon.

• http://www.bloglines.com/

Comment #2 Billy Bob (152.163.37.187) -

I never found it hard to click "My Feeds" when I wanted to check for anything new. If something like that highlighted new stuff in yellow that would be way cool.

I have 26 windows open (some times more). Some are overlapping. One one is full screen for a special application. The last thing I want is something blinking or flashing. I can easily click on any window when *I* want to check it. (you know, like the question of whether your are *OBLIGATED* to answer the phone just because it rings!). Is the dark green blick up "updated" and "0 feeds" updated really helpful?

As far as small fonts (I believe you allow people to select font sizes which is excellent). Now for my rant about fonts in general:

I find it strange that as screen size and resolution increases (for the most part), and "real estate" is free... the massive movement toward using the smallest possible font for everything.

What happened to a "regular" size font for easy reading, somethign a bit smaller for the "unimportant" fine print and bigger to highlight stuff.

Why do we have to squint to uncomfortablely read a website because they chose the smallest font with long lines? A larger font would make things more readable!

Comment #3 Ben Lowery (69.118.226.174) -

Thanks again for the feedback. We're keeping it in mind as we head forward. Keep it coming!

Comment #4 Billy Bob (152.163.39.238) -

An option for auto refresh or not might make it work well for everyone!

Here is an example of what I consider a common abuse of font sizes... is there any reason the freebsd security web page needs to be in a tiny font rather than your browsers default?

The rest of freebsd (at least the documentation) has a nice easy to read font size.

• sucky font size

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