Eatonweb | Rants

i've had this building frustration with people submitting new weblogs for inclusion in the portal. today was just the limit, i have to scream about it. if you take a few minutes to look at the portal, you quickly figure out that it's organized by category, frequency of updates, and type of content (as in links, commentary, journal). not really too complex, although type is a little bit vague.

funnily enough the form to add a blog has fields which match up to those items. i cannot tell you how many times i've gotten say a category of "computers" and a type "news" or a frequency of "mostly daily" or totally new category names when the blog actually fits into a category i've already got.

it's not too much to ask, but come on, if you want your blog listed, please take the time to fit yourself into the classifications that are there. granted that occasionally a new one comes along, but really "digital news" is not that different from "computers/tech", do you really think i'm going to create a new category exclusively for you?

then again i could just be complaining about a useablity problem i've created for myself. obviously type is not a clear term. when i'm getting "arts news from 100 newspapers" as a type, i'm doing something wrong. so maybe i should stop treating my users like they're intelligent, and remove that field. i think i can judge that one for myself anyway. sigh.

addition: i just had to add 2 things. first, i'm not so stupid that i blindly add stuff without checking to see if it's an active blog, i don't add mailing lists just because they get sent in, although i suppose whoever did it could have been hoping that it was an automatic addition. secondly, since i removed the type field, people have started sending in things like cat: general + journal. wierd.