A note on customization

Published May 22, 2007
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If you're going to build a social networking site that encourages (or evolves) a common practice of customizing the page's colors and style, then please, for the love of god, use things like classes and ID tags to make the components of the page accessible to CSS.

I'd previously assumed that MySpace pages looked horrible because nobody on them had any colour sense, but after spending a half hour trying to customize my own by hand, I'm beginning to realise that it's nigh-on impossible to make anything that actually looks good because it's impossible to address anything. I'm resorting to rules like BODY TABLE TR TD TABLE TR TD TABLE TR TD { } and crossing my fingers that there are no other parts of the page hierarchy that match that.
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Comments

Gaiiden
MySpace is a mess, I haven't even bothered with customizing it. They're developing a new profile editor that's supposed to handle that all for you - I'm waiting for it to be available in browsers other than IE though.

Hrm you're not easy to find on MySpace. Results for superpig and richard fine are not working. Guess you'll just have to find me. Gee that was easy [wink]
May 22, 2007 01:32 AM
jbadams
MySpace is an ill-thought-out kludgy design nightmare. The concept is good, and they've certainly built the userbase for it, but thier implementation is just terrible.

Amongst other problems:
- The profile layouts are garbage. There should be hooks for proper css styling of the pages.
- There should be a profile setting to not automatically load and play songs on other peoples pages. You can turn off the autoplay on your own, but are inflicted with everyone else's music whether you like it or not.
- Can't reply to comments on your photos. It's actually quite clever that you need to visit someone else's profile to reply to a comment they left on your profile pages, but not being able to respond to questions and comments in the photo pages is annoying.
- Only able to upload 1 picture at a time. Sheesh.
- The urls are filled with garbage. We wouldn't need those "link to this page" boxes if didn't insist on putting 8 billion settings into the url.
May 22, 2007 03:27 AM
_the_phantom_
Quote:Original post by Kazgoroth
- There should be a profile setting to not automatically load and play songs on other peoples pages. You can turn off the autoplay on your own, but are inflicted with everyone else's music whether you like it or not.
- Only able to upload 1 picture at a time. Sheesh.


Both of these are fixed.
There is a profile preference re:music and recently the upload application was changed so that you can select and upload multiple pictures at once and then add captions to them all.

But yes, the lack of decent customisation is annoying; I've just ha><0red it so that I have a style sheet which throws a DIV over the whole page and then I use that as the base; its all very minimalist [grin]

May 22, 2007 08:01 AM
Ravuya
It's your own fault for using MySpace.
May 22, 2007 09:43 AM
Driv3MeFar
Though its already pretty much been said, the obvious solution is to just not use myspace. Ever. Or visit it, or acknowledge its existence.
May 22, 2007 01:12 PM
jollyjeffers
Quote:Original post by Driv3MeFar
Though its already pretty much been said, the obvious solution is to just not use myspace. Ever. Or visit it, or acknowledge its existence.
I concur [grin]

May 22, 2007 02:09 PM
ApochPiQ
Quote:Original post by Driv3MeFar
Though its already pretty much been said, the obvious solution is to just not use myspace. Ever. Or visit it, or acknowledge its existence.


Quoted for extreme wisdom.
May 22, 2007 02:20 PM
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