"Current Location?"
Mar. 29th, 2006 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crschmidtCurrent location is cool. I've wanted to upload it myself in various capacities for a long time.
But linking somethign that people will typically type in as free form to Google Maps is stupid. People will type 'Home', and linking that to google maps won't get you anywhere!
So, I went through and fixed my style so that the location would no longer be linked to Google maps, as well as reordering the 'currents' so that location would be on the bottom instead of the top.
So now, when I type 'Home" in my current location, it won't be displayed as "Maps.google.com/?q=Home" -- because it's not. It's home, in Cambridge. Of course, the rest of you will still see the links on your friends pages, but I've never optimized my journal for the users who are reading through friends pages: I've optimized it for *me*, and for my journal view pages.
I can see why this was done, but I think this is a case where the engineers (or engineer *cough* Brad *cough*) should have pulled in their usability person before pushing it live :p It's still a pretty cool little box, but I don't like to see it off to what I see as a negative start. Then again, is there much on LJ that I *don't* see as a negative start? ;)
Updated code is in Entry::print_metadata in my custom layer if anyone wants to crib it.
But linking somethign that people will typically type in as free form to Google Maps is stupid. People will type 'Home', and linking that to google maps won't get you anywhere!
So, I went through and fixed my style so that the location would no longer be linked to Google maps, as well as reordering the 'currents' so that location would be on the bottom instead of the top.
So now, when I type 'Home" in my current location, it won't be displayed as "Maps.google.com/?q=Home" -- because it's not. It's home, in Cambridge. Of course, the rest of you will still see the links on your friends pages, but I've never optimized my journal for the users who are reading through friends pages: I've optimized it for *me*, and for my journal view pages.
I can see why this was done, but I think this is a case where the engineers (or engineer *cough* Brad *cough*) should have pulled in their usability person before pushing it live :p It's still a pretty cool little box, but I don't like to see it off to what I see as a negative start. Then again, is there much on LJ that I *don't* see as a negative start? ;)
Updated code is in Entry::print_metadata in my custom layer if anyone wants to crib it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-30 07:07 pm (UTC)In this case, blindly dumping the user-supplied data from a freeform textbox into the query string of a service you have no control over is pretty much always going to be stupid, and would indeed be exposed by having someone not in the "gee whiz cool feature!" mindset evaluate it before it went live. You might even say such a person would be concerned with, I don't know, usability?
This kind of rush-to-deploy-nifty-but-not-tought-out stuff has always been a {problem | strength} of LJ's.