Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's off to work I go....

Mahalo version 4 (M4) came online late today.  It's been about a week since I've been able to work, and I'd just started to enjoy the idleness.  I was really very excited to start work again tonight when I got the email about the new software, and a new how-to page for guides being up and ready for perusal.

The first thing I did was go and claim titles.  Most of the new titles are video how-tos, which I've talked about before in the how-much-do-I-hate-thee theme.  I found five that weren't and snapped them up.

Then I went on to read the guide on how to build pages.  It's somewhat more comprehensive than the last one, and definitely easier to understand and written more clearly.  I'm unhappy with some of the changes and happy with others.

Creating in-links within pages has always been a bit of a chore.  You have to open up a site specific google search, find stuff that exists on Mahalo, go to that page to check if it's a valid page or just a stub, then inlink it.  It took a lot of time and was kind of tedious and boring.  Now, once you highlight a term and click the inlink button on the new software, it will tell you by coming up blue if it's valid, red if the page doesn't exist, or yellow if it exists but is just a stub.  Fast, clean, nice.  I like it.

Entering references is now something you do within the system as well.  You click a button, enter the reference url, and it puts in your link.  This, on the other hand, I don't like.  I write in word, and the previous html tags we used were just fine with me; I could type them directly into my text as I went, and after spell checking the document, I could copy and paste the whole thing into the Mahlo page.  Now I'll have to either type directly into the Mahalo page, trusting my brain to spell check for me (never ever a good option) or will have to write in a word document, keep a list of references in notepad and try and remember where to stick them in.  Both options seem awkward.  If they could implement tools for bold, italic, numbers and bulleted lists and inlinking, why not add a spell check??  This seems to be a major oversight.  I don't like it.


One of my complaints about Mahalo in the past was that your work was out there while it was in progress.  Now, you can work on the page on the site, but it isn't published until you hit the handy-dandy "publish" button at the bottom of the page. Fantastic!  Your in-progress nonsense isn't out there all naked and exposed.  You don't have pages that are only quotations sections with weird videos languishing on the net (as happened with my Anita Blake character page that was in-progress while the system was offline being upgraded). This I really like.

Someone at Mahalo must have been reading about my experience with DMS, because now you have one chance to edit a page, and if it isn't up to standards, that's it.  I have a BIG problem with this and you know I'm gonna tell you why.  I have had several experiences at Mahalo with inconsistent copy editing.  One person wants one thing and one person another.  And sometimes, your work is copy edited by one person first and then a second will do the final check, particularly if your work straddles a week.  In this case, you are very likely to have something thrown back at you.  Secondly, I've had instances where the same person has sent me back for more edits after a first go-over because they missed something they wanted changed the first time.  This is usually something I wouldn't have known about, because it isn't itemized on the gold standard pages.  Unless they are stepping up their clarity on standards for pages and their consistency, this is bad, bad, bad.  I do not like it.  I do not like it in a boat, I do not like it with a goat.  Frankly, it kind of ticks me off that they'd do this without a serious uptick in resources for writers.

The biggest changes seem to be cosmetic, and while I think that the new layout is cleaner than the old one, it takes forever to load and is constantly refreshing in my browser.  I often have three or four Mahalo pages open at a time if I'm working on multiples of something similar.  For example, the Fast Facts sections for books in a series will have the same sources.  So, I'll have five open at once, and flip between them with the library of congress site open so I can put in one ISBN in each, and the author site open to tuck in publication details in each.  Because of the constant reloading of ads, this is making my FireFox perform extremely slowly and making switching between tabs take those extra few seconds that add up to something lengthy at the end of a day.  Additionally, the tabs at the top of the pages seem useless as the information also appears on the main page, and I'm not sure of their purpose.  So, mixed feelings about this one.

The new how-to page includes a list of recommended resource pages.  This is a lot less helpful than having a list of banned sources, or having it the way DMS does (as I've mentioned before, if you attempt to enter a banned site, it automatically notifies you).  The list seems short to me, and doesn't seem to cover a lot, but they did note that it's not a be-all, end-all list, which is okay.  I suppose it's somewhat helpful, probably to new people who aren't used to finding sources.  I may create a custom google search for those sites, as I have for DMS.  Or just continue to use the DMS one for both sites (More likely, though Mahalo doesn't like some of the DMS recommended sites).  So, mixed feelings about this as well.

Of course, since I haven't written anything specific with the new system yet, this is all theoretical as of now.  We'll see what happens this week as I go to work. Hi ho, hi ho.... I'll let ya'll know what happens.