Matthew's Journal

Tags. Great idea, enable my readers and I to search for entries relating to a particular topic, with much more flexibility than the "memories" system.

Except, that they won't work with S1 journals. When I joined LJ, S1 was the only thing going, and I chose one of the available styles, and settled into it. S2 came along, and I played a bit, but I couldn't get it to look like my nice, comfortable S2 style. So I shrugged, and stayed with S1. After all, whilst they would only introduce whizzy new themes and suchlike into S2, that didn't matter, as I was happy with the way my journal looked.

I grumbled about the lack of tags support in S1 journals (if you try and click on a tag in an entry of mine, you just get "sorry, tags only work with S2"). The line I'm getting in the support request I opened is "well, you can just move to S2, so do that if you want tags". The thinking is that the vanilla S1 styles are available as S2 styles. This attitude annoys me because it's not true.


many S1 styles -- including the one you are currently using -- are available as S2 styles as well

Actually, no it isn't. It's pretty close, but it's not the same. This myth that "you can get your S1 style in S2" is pretty irritating, as it excuses screwing over S1 users by only incoporating new features into S2 (and I disagree that tags are a style feature, they're clearly a content feature).

I opened a new broswer window, and put a copy of my journal and friends page into it. I then changed to S2 "Classic", did the same, and here are the differences:

1. The fonts are different. C'mon, how basic a thing to keep consistent is that? I think there may be a size change too
   
2. The text has the top has changed on the journal page from "Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Matthew's LiveJournal:" to "Below are the 50 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Matthew" journal:" I don't mind the number change, note.
   
3. Similarly the text at the top of my friends page has changed from "Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries." to "Below are the 50 most recent friends journal entries:"
   
4. The blue borders around both pages have increased in size
   
5. There are irritating [link] things in the LHS margin
   
6. My userpic has appeared at the top of my friends page. What's the point in that? I know it's my friends page!
   
7. The arrangement of the metadata in the LHS margin has changed on the friends page. It was [vertically centered] username above userpic, userpic left of time (with friends-lock icon below). Now it's [fixed to the top of the entry] time above username above userpic above annoying [link] left of optional friends-lock icon
   
8. [obviously, my journal page in S2 lists the entry tags, but that's fair enough]
   

Now you might just say I'm being anal about this. Maybe I am, but this is look+feel. Surely the new shiny all-singing, all-dancing style system should enable people like me to have their journals look just like they did under S1? Particularly when I did little if any customisation? You might say they're all minor things, but they mean my LJ doesn't look like my LJ to me any more.

You might say "well, you can customise all those things away". Maybe I can. Maybe if I spend hours faffing around under the hood, I could achieve this. But I shouldn't have to. It should Just Work. I have a pretty vanilla S1 setup, so why can't it just be migrated straight to S2? If I could make S2 look like my S1 setup, I'd move like a shot. But it isn't on for LJ to say "if you want this new content feature you have to move to S2" without providing anything resembling a plausible upgrade path.

Tags are about content, not style. They enable my readers (and indeed myself) to look for my veterinary articles, to find my musings on religion, to read my stupid memes if they want to. It's just not on to deny that to S1 users without making it possible for even the easiest-to-migrate of them (those without extensive customisation) to simply move to S2 and keep their journal looking the way they want it.

ETA: the tags-related bit of this rant is less relevant now, as S1 people can have tags too (although the tagged-post-display mode is odd. The rest about how S2 classic doesn't look like S1 stands, though.