Ftrain, by Paul Ford

THIS WAS ONLY GOING TO BE ABOUT 10 WORDS LONG BUT THEN IT KEPT UNFOLDING AS I WROTE IT, SO HERE IS A POINT I WANT TO MAKE UP FRONT BEFORE PEOPLE USE THIS TO BEAT EACH OTHER: Kinja on the front-end has serious interaction issues, although the larger platform itself is fascinating. It's pretty easy to assign blame to product and software engineers for these issues, but at the same time can feel the product direction changing as you use this CMS; there are multiple products inside of here and they are in conflict, and this manifests as inconsistencies in the UX.

Here's a screenshot of the Kinja text editor:

I WANTED TO ADD A HEADLINE AND I JUST TURNED AN ENTIRE LONG SECTION INTO AN h2 what happened it look like a plate of scrambled eggs all the fonts are different sizes and when I hit delete the ENTIRE PARAGRAPH IS erased OKAY thank god UNDO works wait i just erased this entire headline somehow maybe by hitting delete twice yes that appears to be it definitely don't hit delete twice while editing a headline gotit okay the fonts are normal now.

Okay I was down at the bottom writing about undo semantics and then I selected "h2" and now I'm back up at the top of the document by the massive H2. Hello, Paul from 20 minutes ago. I'm going to head back down to the bottom and mess around a little more.

Okay a lot of space showed up here and I'm not sure why. Oh good now I'm back after saving and that space is gone. Eventual consistency :). (No autosmilies.)

This part below is where I started writing, actually; the only reason there is text above here is that the editor kept kicking me back to the top and I wanted to capture that

A Gawker editor recently turned a twitter link I posted into a post and asked me to contribute which forced me to sign up for Kinja and now I have a Kinja account. I mean this is probably my tenth Kinja account but it's at least the twentieth Kinja. I've made fun of Kinja for its weird modals insisting I log in long enough, it's time to see what's here.

So let's see what Kinja can do as a content management platform. I can have italics if I select them and cmd-i but not if I just hit cmd-i wait it turned them on along the way I CAN'T TURN THEM OFF IT JUST KIND OF WORKED okay so if i hit cmd-i TWICE while entering italics text it works, sort of. Let's see if it works consistently. No it does not work consistently. Okay let's move to bolding. Bolding works fine. No, I can't turn it off. I just tried to cursor to the end of the current window and turn off bolding assuming that might get me out of the bold state but no. Let's see if I can get Bold Italic YES OKAY ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE. And back to GODDAMMIT ITALICS ARE STILL ON WHEN WILL THEY TURN OFF okay I hit CMD-i once and italics were off. This is a link and I really like the full-text modal window that pops up because I don't have to think about anything but the text of this link. Link integration in editors is prettttttty brutal; I personally agree with the choice to make it a full takeover modal. I wonder if I will be able to easily edit the link text once I insert this? I can and that's good. It does the popover on link thing suggesting I edit the link. Okay now I am going to save this and then I'm going to come back and try to cut and paste all of it.

There used to be a caption here in small text, but the CMS lost that caption when I saved the document. To be fair I was trying to save the document after I tried to upload a document but then the image-saving process entered into some sort of upload loop and wouldn't terminate; basically the Kinja equivalent of pinwheel. So I'm not sure what saved and what didn't.

Everything else I've noted is just regular bugs and quirks, even if there are a lot of them, but allowing me to save and giving me the affirming that I've saved and then losing my text is bad. The hang-when-uploading-image stuff happens, but the loss of data is the only thing that moves me from "amused and hopeful" to "completely terrified" when it comes to this CMS.

BTW, the caption for the photo above, before it got lost, was "product vision."

Huh

This CMS is somewhat opinionated. Not strongly opinionated. Not consistently opinionated. It doesn't seem to reinvent the wheel entirely. "Quotes are not very smart." “Unicode does seem to pass through, though. So we have UTF-8.” No word on emoji. Should be fine. Not even gonna worry about it.

Other Notes

Cutting and pasting worked! Cutting and pasting worked! Cutting and pasting worked! Cutting and pasting worked! Cutting and pasting worked! Cutting and pasting worked!

Post Scheduler

The POST SCHEDULER is a great piece of work. That's a great live widget. I think that's my favorite thing here. I don't know why it shows timezone if you can't manipulate timezone. But quibbles.

Tagging

Tagging is pretty unexciting–a basic implementation without a ton of smarts. Fine, I guess, but it could be a driver for social integration on this platform given the audience. Such a great way for people to find each other. BuzzFeed does a weird job with this too. Tricky.

Search for a string in the editor

Not really.

Uploading an Image

Okay automatic image text wrapping with no options is pretty great, exactly how it should be. I am worried I will click on this image and see choices for arranging it on the page (which I think is important for a different, lower-volume CMS but could be fatal here). NO! Good job. Advantage simplicity.

I wonder what it's like to read on mobile. Using this CMS reminds of just how insanely hard product work can be and how impossible it is to simplify. The funny with Gawker is that it tries to compete with everything in multiple industries. [ARGH CAN'T TURN OFF ITALICS AGAIN.] There we go. To be fair it's something NO ONE gets right. The deal is that you say this will be italics and now I will stop italicizing but right then you decide that the word "but" [argh come on smart quotes] was the wrong word to use at that exact spot and you've started typing "b" and change your mind and hit delete, which erases the "b" AND the invisible indicator that a non-italicized section is beginning. Maybe the right thing to do is to put an impermeable WordPerfect-style invisible TURNED_OFF_ITALICS shim into the array at the moment a person hit CMD-i, and then highlight that once the cursor goes back again.

Oh wow I've turned on "inspect element" in Chrome to see what's actually happening on key events and huh this thing is a lot weirder than I thought it was. I have sympathy, though.

oh man it's hard to get a header in here sometimes

[1]This should be a header but instead it just put a weird empty space and i bet if i go up and type something in that space...

This is text I selected to make a headline about blockquotes. (After I saved it did turn into a headline but while I was editing it was not a headline. There is some serious line-spacing with these heds. It just stayed the same, so I wrote...)

here is what the above looked like in the text editor when I edited it; here is a picture:

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