September 14, 2008

Sitemeter Changed and I’m Not Happy

World in the Satin Bag

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So Sitemeter, the website I use to track my traffic, has changed it’s entire interface…and I don’t like it. True, the new interface is pretty and reorganized, but it’s also slow as hell. I can’t even get it to the stats section. It just sits there on “loading” the whole time, and the pages I can get to run like crap. If this doesn’t improve in the next twenty-four hours I’ll be forced to go elsewhere for the same service.
This is something that really pisses me off about software designers. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Seriously. What was wrong with Sitemeter’s previous interface? True, it wasn’t beautiful, but it was simple and really easy to use, fast, and graphically un-intensive. That meant it got the job done without having to be flashy. I want a system that works fast. I don’t have time to dilly daddle while trying to figure out how many people have visited my site. I’ve got other things to do, like writing blog posts, or writing in general, or reading. The new Firefox (3.0 I think) did the same thing, making the interface look new and beautiful. The problem? It ran like crap. So I downgraded and I won’t upgrade ever again. And if they force me to upgrade, I’ll go elsewhere for my browsing needs. There’s absolutely no reason to change an already functional interface. None. And if you’re going to change that interface, you should at least offer a “classic” view or skin or something so that people who don’t really give a crap about visual beauty in their software don’t have to deal with it. The good thing about Windows Vista is that it upgrade its interface, but allows you to go to a classic interface. I’ve left my Vista the way it is, because it doesn’t run slow for me, but XP had the same thing and it did run slow, so I used the classic interface.
The way I see it, software designers need to realize that people who like their products probably don’t care if you try to make it look prettier. A lot of us really don’t care. We’re happy with the product as it is. If you need to upgrade, do so without fiddling with the way it looks. There’s really no reason to upgrade the visual layout if all it’s going to do is slow things down.

Moving on.

(Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)

Shaun Duke

Shaun Duke is an aspiring writer, a reviewer, and an academic. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing at Bemidji State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and studies science fiction, postcolonialism, digital fan cultures, and digital rhetoric.

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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

January 22, 2025 No Comments

Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

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And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:

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We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩

Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

Sitemeter Changed and I’m Not Happy

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