This is my critique of Feedster, at the request of Scott Rafer, similar to my critique of Technorati.
- My first point is really annoying for someone like myself who enables javascript debugging. Every search result page has a javascript error. Very annoying.
- The user interface is difficult to navigate. Feedster copied Google's interface, but sometimes copying is not the right thing.
- User's don't need to know about PHP or system errors. For instance, when the Feedster system is down for maintenance, I get the error "NULL Database link is:", which doesn't help.
- Feedster, like today, seems to have really long unplanned outages. Mind you, it's Xmas and I wouldn't expect Scott J to be working. Still, it would be nice if things just worked all-the-time.
The Feedster database seems to be down, so I'm not finished yet. Feedster is back! Searching happiness resumes.
by the numbers?
1. I'm under the impression that most javascript-intensive sites do that to the javascript debuggers (particularly on windows machines). is that not true?
2. What would you change? We're planning a general clean up and a few more interesting tools on the homepage for newbies but not a radical restructuring of the search returns pages.
3. true. those are decreasing in number and frequency but faster would be better.
4. mea culpa. dec 25/6 was the time in at least 90 days (i could look it up but am being mildly lazy) that we had an outage of more than a few minutes. There is a decent chance that we'll be struggling in that regard until the third week in January when the cage gets upgraded.