Old Journal Vs New

brandofamily

I was reading the release notes and looking into the NEW Journal style. For the longest time SM Heros have been telling users to use Jurnal to create HTML only galleries. A hack was even created to make the images non-clicky. What Is the new approach supposed to be once the OLD Journal goes away?
As was stated
"Old Journal die hards, never fear. ... These three styles will stick around as long as we can keep them, but they will no longer be updated or chooseable by your viewers."
Now what???

Andy

brandofamily wrote:

Now what???

Anthony, don't fear. We left Old Journal for this reason. One day, we'll stop supporting it for things like Guestbooks, and such. And when we do, we'll have a replacement in place.

By the way, you can use ANY style to make an HTML-only gallery.

Allen

Not only that be you get stretchy which really messes with html pages. I think
they need to just call the new style by a new name and not journal. It will be
very difficult following someones journal only seeing one at a time. Completely
loses the flow, now have to remember what came before. It's really only a
new single image type view.

brandofamily

Andy wrote:

By the way, you can use ANY style to make an HTML-only gallery.

That is true, but even your site utilzes Journal style for your info pages. As I tend to several sites at this point, one change can mean lots or work:(

Andy

brandofamily wrote:

That is true, but even your site utilzes Journal style for your info pages. As I tend to several sites at this point, one change can mean lots or work:(

Anthony, you could just change them to Traditional

Andy

Allen wrote:

Not only that be you get stretchy which really messes with html pages. I think
they need to just call the new style by a new name and not journal. It will be
very difficult following someones journal only seeing one at a time. Completely
loses the flow, now have to remember what came before. It's really only a
new single image type view.

Try "Traditional" - not stretchy

brandofamily

Andy wrote:

Try "Traditional" - not stretchy

I guess a better question comes after reading Allen's post... why not just leave the OLD Journal style alone and create a new name? Keep it as is for those html galleries. Is there a limit on the number of styles SM can have?
BTW, You CAN make things not stretch if you really want to by specifying a wrapper width...

Andy

brandofamily wrote:

I guess a better question comes after reading Alle's post... why not just leave the OLD Journal style alone and create a new name? Keep it as is for those html galleries. Is there a limit on the number of styles SM can have?

Yes. Each style causes us a ton of engineering and testing work. Enjoy the new styles, they'll show off your work really well.

brandofamily

Andy wrote:

Yes. Each style causes us a ton of engineering and testing work. Enjoy the new styles, they'll show off your work really well.

Showing off is OK, but most of my site is directed to sales. Bigger images means bigger screen shots for the kids to post to myspace etc.

jfriend

brandofamily wrote:

That is true, but even your site utilzes Journal style for your info pages. As I tend to several sites at this point, one change can mean lots or work:(

As five years of experience shows, things change over time here as Smugmug tries to move forward and you will have to make modifications over time to keep your site up-to-date.

You cannot expect an existing set of customizations to never need modification as the site progresses. If that's really what you need, then the only way I know of to get that is for you to have your own site design on your own HTML hosting where you control everything.

It would be nice if Smugmug could get better at letting us preview our site with upcoming changes so we can prepare ahead of time rather than suddenly find things not quite as we want them and have to scramble to fix them. They don't seem to have invented a way to do that. DPR, for example is now rolling out UI changes where people can opt-in to the changes to see how they work while they are in beta. That's a nice idea. It's more work in the implementation, but a lot more customer-friendly and gives you a chance for Smugmug to find bugs before you they roll it out to everyone and gives us a chance to preview our site with the new changes.

Fortunately, these site changes don't break things often, but it does happen.

For example, everyone who used the style picker customization to add a nicer looking style button woke up this morning with two style buttons, the custom one and a new Smugmug one. Not a difficult thing to fix, but something you have to tend to if you want to keep your site current.

Allen

Andy wrote:

Try "Traditional" - not stretchy

Good idea, preserves the set page width. But any gallery can set to set width but extra work.

brandofamily

Allen wrote:

Good idea, preserves the set page width. But any gallery can set to set width but extra work.

Well, I quess if SM will simply leave one style with a set width (I think Journal is 750px) then html galleries will always work as currently set up. But the recreation of the journal style page is a pain... I know, I did it once upon a time. I never said I was bright

brandofamily

Andy wrote:

By the way, you can use ANY style to make an HTML-only gallery.

Oh, this one I know... I have one using Smugmug style currently and have used AllThumbs in the past... I just like the alternating images in journal... I mean OLD Journal style... the new style really is not a journal any longer is it...

Andy

jfriend wrote:

It would be nice if Smugmug could get better at letting us preview our site with upcoming changes so we can prepare

Whoa there, John
This isn't always possible, but we have learned a lot based on your feedback and other customer feedback over the years. Thanks for that, by the way!

First, we put out new journal in a way that old journal didn't get affected. That was a conscious act to prevent customer-head-explosions. Give us some credit, we really thought that out

Next, we just pre-announced today, that old journal one day may go the way of the Dodo. Not today, not tomorrow, but one day. And before we do that, we'll give heads up, and have a new solution for folks' guestbooks, and About Me galleries and current journal galleries. And those that use Journal will likely need to use other, new styles. Times change We'll give as much notice as we can - and we'll accommodate all uses, we hope! BTW, seeking input, here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=136731

We knew about they style picker hack you wrote, but it's so easy to undo it, we chose to go ahead with the SmugMug version of it and have the folks that do use it just remove the hack if they wish. I did this because there was no 'breakage' just an extra button that'll be easy to remove once they see the new SmugMug style button.

Cheers,

Andy

jfriend

Andy wrote:

Whoa there, John
This isn't always possible, but we have learned a lot based on your feedback and other customer feedback over the years. Thanks for that, by the way!

Come on Andy. I didn't say you guys messed this one up. It went reasonably smoothly, though there are customers who's feathers are ruffled.

I just described something that would be even better. It is possible - it just takes extra engineering to do what I described. You guys decide whether it's worth it or not to you and your customers. For example, I know JT mentioned one time that he would like to redesign the way the breadcrumb HTML is laid out (using UL/LI). That would break a lot of breadcrumb customizations. I don't know if you're ever going to actually implement that or not, but how would people adapt to some like that ahead of time without seeing things just break without some ability to see the new changes at their own discretion and switch over to the new design when they've adapted?

Are you making a formal announcement that old journal is going away and people should design it out now? If so, I hope there's a better way to communicate that than a few casual mentions in dgrin postings and a vague reference in the release notes. And, some more specific guidance about what people should use instead of those services, about and contact pages would be useful.

Andy

jfriend wrote:

Are you making a formal announcement that old journal is going away and people should design it out now? If so, I hope there's a better way to communicate that than a few casual mentions in dgrin postings and a vague reference in the release notes. And, some more specific guidance about what people should use instead of those services, about and contact pages would be useful.

Haha, no, sorry for my miscommunication - we're not making a formal announcement yet.

When we do, there'll be a homepage news item, a release note, and as much heads up as possible... we'll give lots of time, and options for folks. And we'll take input, like here: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=136731 Hopefully we'll be able to keep every single customer happy

Erick L

The new journal isn't remotely close to the old style. It isn't even close to a journal, ie images backed with longer text or vice-versa. This is not just a customization hiccup. I do expect some sort of continuity over time.

I used to have html-only pages to put text. They are listed with an ugly "empty gallery" thumbnail so I made them unlisted and created html-only page to list those page. Then I had use some oddball code to change the breadcrumb so it would lead back to the html-page list instead of category full of unlisted galleries. This was code-heavy, I was affraid some change at SM would mess it up and Google couldn't find those pages. So I scrapped the whole thing and uploaded one image per html page so they can be listed with a featured photo. It's all much more simple because I use SM system. I'm even getting traffic back from Google.

And now you want to scrap that too.

Andy

Erick L wrote:

The new journal isn't remotely close to the old style.

We've not said it was in fact, we don't say that at all. We do say it's a new style, with big huge photos that fill your screen.

It isn't even close to a journal, ie images backed with longer text or vice-versa. This is not just a customization hiccup. I do expect some sort of continuity over time.

I used to have html-only pages to put text. They are listed with an ugly "empty gallery" thumbnail so I made them unlisted and created html-only page to list those page. Then I had use some oddball code to change the breadcrumb so it would lead back to the html-page list instead of category full of unlisted galleries. This was code-heavy, I was affraid some change at SM would mess it up and Google couldn't find those pages. So I scrapped the whole thing and uploaded one image per html page so they can be listed with a featured photo. It's all much more simple because I use SM system. I'm even getting traffic back from Google.

And now you want to scrap that too.

We don't, please - read my posts and thanks for the input, Erick.

Erick L

I've read your posts Andy. You said you'd nuked it and now you're backing off. It doesn't matter to me if you nuke it next week or next year. I wanna know it stays or not. The whole reason I joined Smugmug is because I could have galleries AND text pages. Should I waste more time creating journal pages?

Andy

Erick L wrote:

I've read your posts Andy. You said you'd nuked it and now you're backing off. It doesn't matter to me if you nuke it next week or next year. I wanna know it stays or not. The whole reason I joined Smugmug is because I could have galleries AND text pages. Should I waste more time creating journal pages?

Hey Erick, we're taking input on Journal uses right now. Like I've said in my posts, we want to accommodate all uses. You're right, I used the word nuke and shouldn't have - already apologized for that, but I'm happy to do so again - sorry about that!

You can have text (html) pages in any gallery style, not just Journal.

Allen

The new journal_new style has no resemblance to the old journal style. Form,
fit or function. It should have been named a completely new style like
singleImage or something.

The story line is completely lost, it was more about the text/story flow and
not a gigantic photo. They could always click the photo and get a bigger one
if they wanted. And even better, the click could open in lightbox which has
been requested for many moons. Would sure beat hitting the back button.

Erick L

I know you can use any style. I use SM style to embed Google maps.

If you read my posts , you'd see that I used html-pages for my texts but I found it a lot more simple to upload one image in journal style and put text there. It looks clean and the listing looks better without the "empty gallery" frame. Using html-only pages was a real PITA in comparaison.

The real kicker is that Google finds my texts on the journals but wouldn't find them on html-only pages, probably because Google sees the html-only page as a stuffed meta-description without content. There's a HUGE difference right there. I'm finally getting traffic back.

Some suggestion to improve the old style:
- Control on number of images per page. I've seen this asked before many times. It would help me to spread a text over several pages instead of creating a new gallery for each page.
- Make images non-clickable easy, or use the lightbox instead of single image view.
- Allow for a short caption AND text and only show the short caption when clicking on image. This might be a little complicated though.
- Easy control over image position (left, center, right). Something is already possible via CSS. Not something I need personally.