It's fair to say The Stirrer is technically somewhat circa 1999. Of course good and engaging content can save you from any level of shonky web design, even resizing popup windows, but I do find I have to employ an army of Firefox extensions and Javascript blockers in order to drag Adrian Goldberg's site into the future.
Almost as a concession to us web 2.0 folks Adrian mirrors his features on a Blogger blog. Except he also embeds a huge video in the sidebar which, in my browsers at least, overlaps the article I want to read. Judicious use of Adblock will sort that but it does mean referring people to the Blogger blog is out of the question.
So, just how are you supposed to read this?
There is some good news though. The RSS feed from the Blogger blog (not the one from the main Stirrer site - that one's beyond useless) has recently gone Full, which means once you're subscribed to it you'll never need to visit the web pages again (unless you want to link to them of course). Here's the link for you to subscribe to.
It's worth pointing out that while I may be taking the piss a little here the fact that I consider it worth going through all these hoops and hacks in order to monitor Adrian's site says something.
Almost as a concession to us web 2.0 folks Adrian mirrors his features on a Blogger blog. Except he also embeds a huge video in the sidebar which, in my browsers at least, overlaps the article I want to read. Judicious use of Adblock will sort that but it does mean referring people to the Blogger blog is out of the question.
So, just how are you supposed to read this?
There is some good news though. The RSS feed from the Blogger blog (not the one from the main Stirrer site - that one's beyond useless) has recently gone Full, which means once you're subscribed to it you'll never need to visit the web pages again (unless you want to link to them of course). Here's the link for you to subscribe to.
It's worth pointing out that while I may be taking the piss a little here the fact that I consider it worth going through all these hoops and hacks in order to monitor Adrian's site says something.
7 Comments:
I've found using Firefox that you can get the video to be the right size just by switching tabs. Open Stirrer then go to a different tab and return and it is normal size. I don't know about other systems - the extensions that may contribute to the effect are noscript and flashblock.
Oh, there are plenty of ways to bodge it. I just don't want to be sending people there with a whole bunch of instructions!
Interesting about the resizing. Implies maybe it looks okay on Adrian's computer. Any Windows people like to test it on IE?
Thanks, Pete. I wasn't reading Adrian's site -- and now I will.
Site redesign and feed promotion needs to be priority one for him. There must be so many like me simply not going back, despite the content...
Promotion-wise i think they're doing alright. As for web 2.0 stuff I doubt we'll see it any time soon - it's not punk-rock enough ;)
I read somewhere on a geeky blog the other day that less than 5% of web users even know what an RSS feed is - despite some of us (well me) doing almost all our browsing from a feed reader. I've tried to explain RSS to a few people at work that could really use it, but it seems to still be one step to far.
The blog is pretty dead, despite the fairly busy Stirrer forums - me I don't really have time for forums, all the back-biting and checking back every five mins. I even use a thing called CoComment to send me an RSS feed of anything happening with blogpost i've commented on.
I'd imagine only 5% of a site's readership leave comments but that doesn't make a comments facility any less worth having.
Without being big-headed, the sort of people who use RSS feeds are the sort of people who you want to be reading your site because they are, by definition, reading a lot of stuff and doing something with that information. The folk who get there through bookmarks are nice and useful but they don't add to the bigger conversation and whatnot.
(The blogger blog is, I think, just a way of having a feed. It's not meant to be somewhere to leave comments. That's what the forum is for. I could be wrong of course.)
The thing with The Stirrer is it really has a chance to make Birmingham's online world something special. Adrian's got the dedication, drive and contacts to put together a really good and useful site. He's just lacking the technical knowhow to push it to another level.
Totally agree, although I reckon that actual feed-readers are a very tiny percentage indeed. searching for some actual figures I found this, which is optimistic about growth, but as I see it there's a long way to go before RSS is that important to mainstream sites (I actually think that sites like the BBC overstate it in terms of importance).
I worry, about the dividing effect of technology in this respect - sort of pulling the ladder up on the huge amount of info out there. While some of us get the news faster and get more of it, how do we encourage other people to look harder when the tools are more than they can find the time/energy to learn.
"While some of us get the news faster and get more of it, how do we encourage other people to look harder when the tools are more than they can find the time/energy to learn."
I dunno. I don't subscribe to the general BBC and Guardian feeds - I check their front pages instead. I don't want to get more news faster from them, I want it nicely sorted and editorilised for me so I can get on with other stuff.
RSS is a tool so that you can et your information out to interested parties as easilly as possible, the sorts of people who aren't going to bother visiting your website every few hours to see if anything's changed.
If you're producing (urgh) "content" RSS puts you on the map, locks you into the grid, makes you part of the network. This is distinct from the casual readers who isn't interested in receiving more information faster.
To put it another way, my Mum was asking about all my feeds and what it all meant and I'll happily explain it to her but I think the technology is overkill for her. She knows where my site is and gets enough from that.
It's a tricky one to explain so thanks for getting me to worth through it!
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