July 27, 2012 09:57 PM UTC

Time to Upgrade?

• 3 Comments
• by: Aristotle

Back in 2006, when Pols had been online for something like a year and a half but I was still pretty new to the site, they upgraded the blogging software they were using to soapblox. At the time, it was a hell of an improvement. Besides debuting a login system, soapblox has a lot of really cool features you don’t see all together with other platforms: cascading comments, clear “new” labels on comments and diaries, the ability to see not only your own comments but direct replies to them (this one might be totally unique to soapbox), seeing who is currently logged in, just to name a few. It’s very cool.

But it’s been six years since the switchover, and as far as I can tell, nothing new has been introduced. Six years is a long time on the web.

Now, I don’t want to seem ungrateful. Like other blogs, Pols provides this to users like me for free, and it’s a wonderful service. I don’t know what their revenue stream is like (for good reason – it ain’t any of my business), so I don’t know what they can afford. I know also that soapblox is local, and it’s good to support the local developers. I can live with it if things remain the same. But there are things I’d like to do with Pols that I cannot at this time.

I have two chief concerns. One, soapblox seems to be compatible only with old versions of HTML. You can’t easily embed most videos, and now that youtube is taking away the “use old code” option, it’s virtually impossible to post any videos now. Two, there seems to be no mobile version of ColoradoPols. (My guess is that soapblox is the issue again, but I’m no web guru.) When I’m out and about, I have to basically forget about checking up on Pols because the full pages take so long to load and I constantly have to zoom in. Nothing fits the mobile unit’s screen.

There are other improvements I’d like to see on the Pols site. I have the ability to refresh the page at some other blogs and not lose whatever I’ve written in the unpublished comment I’ve just written. This is minor; I can (and do) copy the comment when I need to do this. (There are times when it’s taken me some time to write what I’m trying to say – I refresh to make sure someone else hasn’t already made the same point because I hate jumping on top of a pile. Well, most of the time anyway.)

Other things have changed since 2006, notably the advent of social networks. Most professional blogs have little Twitter and Facebook symbols (and sometimes others) which allow you to share diaries and stories easily. I think it would be cool if Pols incorporated those into their diaries.

These are things that I’ve been thinking about when using Pols for a while now. Do you think Pols needs (or should) upgrade their system at all?

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