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josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •




    "Gee, what does THIS button do?" I accidentally hit the thumbs down, and for some reason the delete button wasn't appearing when I first wrote this, so I was left having to give Yahoo a thumbs up or thumbs down. The truth is, I don't feel comfortable doing either. Yahoo is a mix of good and bad.



    Yahoogroups, despite small frustrations such as the disabling of music on the group homepages, is still a highly reliable place to host a mailing list with attractive customization possibilities. Flickr offers the widest diversity of photography forums I'm seen, yet. But ... the staff has little history of listening seriously to user concerns when setting policy, a troubling habit of responding to trollish behavior with ill-advised attempts at appeasement, a tendency to leave products in Beta for years with serious defects unremedied, and the company has twice surprised users with the closings of popular services in what seems to be a response to the so-called "peanut butter manifesto".



    But I'm stuck doing thumbs up or thumbs down, right? The tie breaker, for me, aside from the halfbaked nature of products that came out of some occasionally great ideas (eg. pipes) are the badly skewed priorities that are seen when the company feels that a cheesy gossip site is considered a worthy use of the human resources that its blogging community is being destroyed to conserve. To give a thumbs up in response to that would be to show disrepect for a lot of fellow users who stand to lose far more than I do, and deserve far better than they're getting. The thumb stays red, especially after a little recent fun I've mentioned in a May 19, 2008 post entitled Those Little Dickens at Yahoo.



    Yahoo has been reviewed on Yelp; the image you see is a thumbnail of a photo uploaded by the Yelp user Mitchell "Maximum Mitch" Aidelbaum, more of whose photos can be seen here.