Posted: August 12th, 2007 by Alison Ruth

Categorised as:  DominoBlog  Silly 

Trying to update this blog is sometimes quite frustrating.  The restrictions on the ways of inputting information, while to some degree necessary, are almost archaic.  Blogs are mostly a Web2.0 phenomena, even though there were around in the early days.  Blogs are about interaction, about expression, and yet, the ways in which I interact with this blog are severely restricted.

Admittedly, I now have two ways of updating this blog.  One through the Lotus Notes Client, the other through the web interface (which I'm currently using).  The web interface is preferable as it runs in a browser.  Lotus Notes, on the other hand, requires significant system resources to even run.  Saving the document is slow, and the preview requires me to log in twice to the web interface.  The downside of the web interface is that there is no preview.  The other just discovered downside to the web interface is that I cannot resize the text box. 

What's that you say?  I shouldn't be able to resize text boxes.  Well, normally I'd agree with you, but I have this little Firefox addon which allows resizing of text boxes called, unsurprisingly, Resizable Form Fields.  It's quite handy in all sorts of places, particularly in Learning@Griffith as many of the text entry boxes there are too small to read what you are writing.

But, here, in the domino blog web interface, the text box is inside an iframe which prevents me from resizing the window and makes formatting a headache as every time I want italics or bold, I have to press the button then click back in the frame and it doesn't tell me whether it has worked.  Yes, I know the interface is still being developed and it was cobbled together to make people like me happy.  But, it's not working ... yet.

See, now, if I want to reread what I've written, I have to scroll back up.  I can't see my whole entry.  I don't know what I've said.  (Yes, that's probably normal for me, anyway, but let's not let the truth get in the way of a good story.)

The other thing which is breaking me about these things is that I can't (apparently) choose to have a two column layout as opposed to the three that you see.   I think this thing would be much better with only two columns, don't you?  And while I'm wishful thinking, can I have a purple colour scheme too?

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