Random Rambling: LJ inadequacies

I ranted on this a little when I first started using LJ, and I’ve mentioned things here and there that bothered me, and some of the things that bothered me got fixed. So, I figured that I’d put my current comprehensive list in one place:

  • While the Friends List aggregates people’s posts, it doesn’t do a good job of showing me what entries and comments are not yet read… I have to wade through the list to find what might interest me, and if there are any unread comments.
  • The spell checker doesn’t understand contractions.
  • The spell checker doesn’t understand HTML.
  • The spell checker doesn’t understand UTF-8 (which is the default). That is, if you type anything that’s not in the ASCII 128-character set, it confuses the spell-checker.
  • Journal entries display local time (Eastern); comments display server time (Pacific).
  • The update journal form sets the time by default to the time that you start updating. I’d prefer it to simply puts in the server time of the time that you post it if you don’t specify a time to override it with. Sometimes I’ll spend hours between starting a post and finishing it because I’m doing other things, and then I sometimes write about those things I’m doing, but each time I finish writing a post I have to go set the time on it to the current time.
  • There’s no way for a visitor to ask a question and/or start a conversation topic on “my” page… Visitors can only comment on what I’ve started. While I’d certainly want this to be an optional feature, there’s something here that seems missing.
  • There’s no easy search feature to grep through your journal (not that I saw, anyway, while trying to construct this post)

Maybe the way I want LJ to work just isn’t how the rest of the world does. Although, for some parts that I want to be different, I don’t have a good description of what it is exactly that I want to change. Perhaps I should look at some of the other logging sites out there to see if I like one of them better. (Google recently launched one.)