Ross

How Can I Improve Vox?

I've been remiss in posting here on Vox lately, mostly because work has been kicking my butt during the day and dealing with sick kids has been kicking my butt at night.  In my spare time though, I've been toying with a couple programming ideas for things I can do to help improve the Vox experience - specifically, areas where I think Vox itself is lacking in the functionality I'd want to see (such as exporting and backups).  Obviously, I can't do much to change the framework/backend of the program, but I might be able to make some changes to the UI (through Greasemonkey scripts) or to third-party interaction (through other programming languages). 

I'd like your opinion, too.  If you don't mind, click on some options in the poll below and let me know what you think I should be focusing my meager time & efforts on over the next few weeks:



Tags:
This also appears in:

Next Posts

Previous Posts

Comments

Sixbucksamonkey
I sense a hint of sarcasm in #4. Good for you!

How many times do I get to vote? =D
mariser

sorry to hear the girls are sick. hope they are better soon so y'all can get some sleep.

Ross
I'm not sure if it counts based on cookies or what - I thought it would actually keep track of quantity of votes, too, but not sure that it is going to do that. I actually listed the programming projects in order that I expect to do them, though. The blog export may be a bit of a bitch to figure out, since it's going to involve a lot of parsing & stripping of Vox-specific stuff before turning it into a format that another blogging platform can read (thinking either Wordpress or TypePad, depending on what I can get in way of documentation). But since Vox has pretty much made it clear they're not going to let people export, I'll have to do it the old fashioned way - scrape and save.
Sixbucksamonkey
[this is good]
You can do eeet!
maura_ea
I would LOVE to export my entries - but I have to admit I'd miss all the pictures, books, music & links I put in my posts. I just want to be able to print it from a company like Blurb to tell you the truth, but they only support Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and LiveJournal...
Ross
I still have to look at the details, but I'm hoping that things like links, photos, etc will be retained in the posts - they will probably only link back to the vox blog URLs, so you wouldn't want to completely delete all the files in your library, but it would be better than not having them in the posts at all.

I'll keep everyone posted when I make some progress on these!
patapete
[this is good]
I've always been kind of miffed with the way vox sets up their posts, e.g. unable to save drafts, poor layout choices, etc. If you could fix those Ross, that would make vox just a wee bit better for me :)
Ross
Sorry, can't really help with the layouts (at least, not from a perspective of letting other users see the layout you want them to see). GreaseMonkey can change your own personal view but that's about the end of its usefulness.

As for drafts - it's true you can't save drafts in the sense that you can on, say, a Wordpress blog. Here's a hack I wrote up last year on how to effectively save a post as a draft, though.
LeendaDLL
I don't care about my music, nor my words, but I'd really like to backup my Vox photo library to disk with one (or two) click(s).
Something Else
The thing that makes me craziest is accidently moving away from the Compose page and losing the masterpiece I've been toiling to create. Can you fix that? "Recover" never seems to bring anything back for me.
Red Pen
It's great that you are willing to spend time on our behalf. Thanks!
Ross
It appears that the .mp3 backup solution I'm thinking of would be very easy to transform into a photo backup solution.

The only drawback is it will require you to install some basic software before you run the program. If I get it running I can walk you through it though, as needed.
Ross
Love to help out the community. My biggest problems are coming up with ideas for projects and finding the time to complete them. When I get some things like this that it sounds like people will really use, I really enjoy doing it.
Ross
Unfortunately, this again is something I can't fix on the Vox side of things. However, if you are a Firefox user, there is a Greasemonkey script you can install that will help you a little bit:

Protect Textarea - This script brings up a popup asking if you really want to navigate away from the page (after you've been typing in a text box). Thus, if you accidentally hit the back button, you'll get a popup asking if you really want to continue. If you hit "cancel", you stay on the page. Not sure it works in ALL cases, but it adds an extra level of protection.

Of course, if you REALLY want to make sure you don't lose the post you're typing, compose it in something besides Vox first. Writing it in MS Word or Notepad will get you the text portion, and then you can copy/paste it into Vox and add media, format, etc. The benefit comes when you crash your browser before posting - you still have all that text in an editor on your computer, and can just re-copy and paste again into another compose window...
Something Else
Thanks for the advice!

Post a comment

Already a Vox member? Sign in

You will be asked to join Vox to post this comment.

Advertisement