Friday, 26 October 2012

Goodbye apexblogs.info

http://www.apexblogs.info was a place I visited daily. A couple of days ago this domain was moved to http://www.odtug.com/apex. I am not sure I understand why but it doesn't matter. The only thing is that from the usability perspective this is now at least two steps back.



The current layout of the page is displaying a couple of logos, advertisements and some general information and the content is not in the focus - 75% of the page is not showing that, what you would actually expect. You need to scroll down to find the content and you need to scroll a lot. There are all together three scrollable regions including the page and if you don't watch you will easily loose the orientation.

Now, the question to ODTUG people would be if this is going to change in the near future. Hopefully there are plans to improve the usability of this popular resource. Otherwise the whole action doesn't make a lot of sense.
on

9 comments:

  1. Andrzej Nowakowski (APEXUTIL.COM / DBE)26 October 2012 at 09:55

    Denes, You Right.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gerben26 October 2012 at 14:14

    Denes you could not be more right. But I also had setup the RSS feed of apexblogs.info in my favorite RSS reader and now I grab the data from the ODTUG RSS Feed. So I still can have my daily digest of Apex like I did from apexblogs.info. Maybe this is more convenient for you or other readers.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous26 October 2012 at 20:22

    I also agree Denes. apexblogs.info was a great place to go and was very user friendly. Now the usability of the site within the odtug framework really needs improvement. The introduction of the scrollbars to read additions to the site instead of the 1-10, 11-20 navigation really does not work and the new screen design needs a lot of work to utilise the width of the page. I'm very surprised that the reduction in the usability of the site was allowed to happen. Hope things will be improved soon.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous30 October 2012 at 11:51

    Denes you are right, Apexblogs used to be great for developers the new site is embarassing I cant believe Dimitry put his name on this, what a joke

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dimitri Gielis30 October 2012 at 15:50

    For the people who liked the standalone APEXBlogs... I would say, give ODTUG your feedback and then give them some time to get an update out.

    I'm convinced the potential under the ODTUG flag is bigger in the future and many more possibilities are there. For example linking personal profiles with presentations, blog posts, conferences, communities etc.

    The platform they use still needs some tuning, but hopefully everything will be fine in a couple of weeks.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous31 October 2012 at 13:53

    Dimitry yes the potential with ODTUG might be bigger than standalone, but this looks like it was just rushed out and looks terrible.

    Did you try it out before they went live, if you did then why would you let them go live? if you didnt try it out then why not?

    >but hopefully everything will be fine in a couple of weeks.

    then why not wait until everything was fine before doing it?

    bad bad bad

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous2 November 2012 at 01:41

    Just saw that amendments have been made on 1st November.

    Thank goodness the necessary changes have taken place so quickly.

    It's one of the sites I visit over and over again and was a bit taken aback by the introduction of the additional scrollbars.

    Things look a lot, lot better now.

    Many congratulations on your site Dimitri and thank you for providing this fantastic learning resource over the past few years.

    Let's hope it continues to be a great success and goes onto greater things in its new location.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous15 February 2013 at 08:50

    I still don't get it how the pagination works...
    On the good old Apexblogs.info site from Dimitri, there we're the 1-10 11-20 page indicators..
    Now there is a see more, which i can only click once, and then see all the most recent articles, and below that some more,.. but this cannot be all the articles....
    please update this too

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous5 May 2013 at 21:05

    Any improvement in the odtug apex blogs?
    No action from them. So shame, like other people, I always went daily to see the great apex blogs. Now? Never .... So frustrating.
    Dimitri, please take it back the apex blogs.

    ReplyDelete