What did they do to Kinja?
22 December 2005, terribly early in the morning
Shima uses Kinja to see when her friends have posted new articles on their blogs. I use Bloglines for this purpose, mostly because it works a lot better. Kinja is nice and simple, and I always thought that was its edge. I made Shima a Kinja digest because I thought it was simpler than Bloglines to use (I don’t think this is the case anymore). Today, a new version of Kinja was rolled out; this new Kinja is ugly. Now, that’s not a real criticism of the new design, that’s my subjective opinion on its aesthetics. Here are a few, real, criticisms I have with the new system:
There are no direct links to the sites you read on your digest page anymore, only links to the individual article entries. To find a link to a site you subscribe to, you have to go to the site’s summary page first, which has a link to the actual subscribed page on it.(Sometimes a site might have several new entries in a row. I used to just go to the sites themselves to read all the new entries, rather than open up several tabs to read each one.)- The links on a web site’s summary page open in a new window—come on, what year is this?
- You can tag your digests now. What value does a tagged digest provide? I haven’t a clue. What exactly would Shima tag her digest? Is she supposed to describe herself or her friends? Or both?
- The site takes up more screen real estate now (although the actual content of interest is small and on the left-side of the screen)
Before the roll out, service was out for several days. No one seemed to notice; people with blogs like to bitch—a lot—and yet no one seems to have complained about Kinja being down for a few days. I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions as to what the radio silence means.
Update: It’s the morning now, and reading this post again, I can see it is quite snarky. Sorry about that. Also, the irony of me saying no one bitches about Kinja online, while bitching about Kinja online, is not lost on me.
Update Jan 18 2006: Well someone fixed the no direct links to your subscribed homepages problem—good job!