Posted on 05/09/2009 10:08:27 PM PDT by Tzimisce
Most people on Daily Kos are (painfully) aware of Free Republic, the bottomless digital repository of bigotry, authoritarianism and hatred for most other Americans, all wrapped in 90's-era HTML. Usually, sane people who stop by there to check it out, find something utterly appalling within a few minutes of browsing, and close the page, never to return. Thus, there isn't a lot of detailed knowledge of Free Republic on Daily Kos.
One important feature of the site is that it is community-supported through donation drives called "Freepathons." In 2008, Jim Robinson, the site founder, seems to have decided to purge the archives of all but the current and most-recent Freepathon threads. This is a wise decision on his part because you don't have to go back very far to see that Free Republic is struggling to meet its modest fundraising goals.
BBTTT.
So many of the web forums are impossible to read; the indentation schemes can be very odd --- the most annoying for me are the ones that use a tabular layout, and allow each row to have floating width first columns. That means that your eye has to hunt around if you trying to read down the second column. Then there are those with repetitious and silly "avatar" pictures, color schemes that actively work against readability, and a host of other clumsy user interface goofs.
Free Republic's layout is elegant and eminently readable, and facilitates reading a great deal of material in a short period of time.
Me, I kind of like "simple," even 90's html... so many sites are so junked up with audio, flash, shockwave, popups/unders, and other trash that you can't get the information you want.
One would think at first encounter that the FR scheme of interlaced conversations would be quite confusing. It is not so. The human brain can apparently follow parallel conversations quite well.
Which provides very little actual information since several people will inevitably have the same avatar. The human brain, on the other hand, likes names very much.
Heh! I remember having “close everything” HTML text handy to post into a thread.
Here's an unspoken fact: Your employer "pays" you. Writes you a check to work for them.
0bama Motors (Formerly GMC)writes a pretty sizeable check to Rush and Sean.
They don't like to admit it. It is what it is.
Limbaugh and Hannity should void the checks and post images on their web sites.
I still find this forum the easiest to follow and use of all the ones I either belong to or visit.
The Bulletin Board variants like our sister site, free Dominion, aren't bad, but their "paged" format makes it easy to miss things- here, you just keep scrolling to find stuff.
Probably the worst are those that use nested folders, like a sentence diagram-- I go stark starin' Cuckoo trying to follow conversations on those.
The chatrooms with live chat- seems like our Yahoo! fallback site had one, once-- aren't too bad once you jump in them, but I've never been very good a chatter.
We also can't forget — as much as we'd want to — the "Rathergate" fiasco. It was Free Republic posters who first noticed that Rather's memos appeared to be documents produced by modern technology. In fact, several of the images displayed to encourage donations during Freepathons highlight this event.
That is a very grudging acknowledgement of the excellence of Free Republic.
ROFLOL.
Go Jim Rob.
| great use of a table! |
I’m a member of a number of forums reflective of my interests. Few of them (two exactly) are as easy to read and navigate as is FreeRepublic. The other website/forum is also “wrapped in 90’s-era HTML”.
I make my living in the technology sector, but I hate techy stuff just because it is the latest techy stuff - that goes for those miserable complex websites which bounce and flash and are nearly impossible to navigate. Technology should be efficient and serve the user, not the other way around.
JimRob - I trust you will ignore the jibs and keep things the way they are.
Agreed. Simplicity is Genius.
The, “The Red Pen” Kos poster is their version of Anti-Freeper.
Ask Obama for a bailout. Oops, this is FR, not DU.
bttt
“...wrapped in 90’s-era HTML”
Must be a good thing. I can read the news from FreeRepublic on my lunch hour at work, where blogs are automatically blocked by the company software!
If you want to see DUmmies heads explode, have Jim post a story that FR received a federal bailout!
DUmmies are so easy to manipulate!
Daily who?
As a full time Software QA / QC worker I can tell you that is the case in reviewing the Software transitioning to us for Post Development Service Support and on the written User Defect Reports, our Code Engineers written Assessment of the Defect and the Written Technical Solution.
We won't even get into formal reports, papers, and technical recommendations/proposals.
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