--- layout: post title: Test post from Flock blog manager created: 1124442031 categories: - Social Media - Web Development ---

Lloyd responded to my Flock feedback and I'm finally finding a few minutes in the middle of the night to respond.


Q: How do I give feedback? A: http://beta.flock.com/feedback, and Help Menu > Give Feedback

That feedback doesn't seem very friendly and seems very bug focused -- don't you want suggestions as well. A forum? Flickr just used their threaded discussion groups to gather feedback, report bugs, etc. On the other extreme, The Robots use 43 Things alien technology to allow users to actually rate/rank desired features and bugs.

The Help Menu item is nicely hidden. I explore menus once, but I don't tend to go there much. While you're in this early alpha/beta stage, you might want to include an actual toolbar button for feedback/bugs -- Safari used to have this on by default in the early days, and it's still a toolbar option. Another option might be to add feedback to the magic plus button dropdown menu (does this have a name?).

Q: How do I manually configure my blog settings? A: ???

I actually found the "Options" menu, so the new bug report should actually read as follows:

Title: Blog manager does not let you customize your blog settings if it fails to auto-detect

It seems to only reliably detect WordPress blogs.

Work around: have the blog manager auto-detect something that auto-detects successfully. Then, use Options > Configure blog to change the settings to whatever you like. I am very likely the first person to suck down content from a Basic Auth protected Drupal site using Blog Manager :P

Now that I'm working with the Blog Manager (it's how I made this post), I have some feedback there, too.

  1. I don't see a button for adding links. I can drag and drop links from my shelf, but I can't hilight text and add a link (ahh...found it using ctl-click in context menu...I think you still need a toolbar button).
  2. Hitting return creates a <br>. Hitting return multiple times some times magically transforms this into a <p> tag. I'd like an option whether return creates paragraphs or line-breaks by default -- I like return to be a paragraph, and shift-return to get a line break.
  3. I get nervous when there is no obvious "save" button when I'm in draft mode (/me copies the source from this long post)
And here's a nice picture of a tree in Victoria as thanks for letting me play with this tool.

Flickr Photo

And for tracking purposes:

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