I’ve been active on Micro.Blog for 5 years, modified my theme a few times. Feedback on a new blog: setting up a new Micro.Blog account is hard, frustrating and confusing. Even choosing a theme from Plugins is hard: not enough info, info in the Github page that doesn’t apply…
Anna Havron Yes, I found it a struggle for both of my micro.blog blogs; and Github is incomprehensible to me.
Nominal it does seem like plugins and themes are very different things that shouldn’t go together
Miraz Jordan @nominal Well, to be fair, you can select to see only Theme Plugins. One problem is there's very little useful info in the Theme description. For example: "Changes your blog to use the [name] theme" tells me nothing about the theme. Something like: "A one column theme with a focus on good typography, with excerpts on the Home page and a built-in Search" would give me something to work with.
Miraz Jordan @annahavron I'm finding it very interesting setting up as a new user (for a blog I'm moving). I think it would pay for Micro.Blog to really focus on the flow of getting a new user up and running. This could be an excellent project for someone who isn't already familiar with all the underpinnings to work on. It would help Micro.Blog open up to non-techy subscribers. @help
Pratik @annahavron Even as a ever-so-slightly-inclined techie, I have no idea how Github works.
Michael Descy I agree. It is more difficult to go into Plugins to choose your theme than it was before, when you picked a theme from a page full of previews. It may be one of those things that makes more sense to programmers than to everyone else.
💬 John Philpin Miraz Jordan @pratik @annahavron As I work on this I'm realising a lot of the info is written by coders for coders. I'd visit the Github page for a theme to find out what it did and would see a wall of coder jargon.
Miraz Jordan @JohnPhilpin @nominal I was easily able to filter the list of plugins to just show themes. There's a button right at the top.
Odd-Egil “Oddzthrash” Auran Yes. The new look on the front page helps though. It’s like it’s saying “We won’t bite you!”.
Miraz Jordan @odd Yes, that's a good start. But then the experience needs to flow through.
Odd-Egil “Oddzthrash” Auran True. Maybe someone not-at-all technical with an open mind should be asked to try to get on the platform and not be afraid to ask questions. @manton
Manton Reece This is important for us to hear, thank you. Every theme really should have a preview link (more than the thumbnail) and the GitHub links should be less prominent.
Miraz Jordan @manton It looks to me like the theme developers include the description in the theme files. If they could all be encouraged to write some desciptive text about the Micro.Blog version of the theme itself that would help enormously. Things like features such as typography, sidebar, built-in search etc.
Manton Reece Definitely. A lot of the bad descriptions for the earlier themes are my fault… Should be easy to update them.
💬 John Philpin actually plus a standardized list of features and whether the theme supports it out of the box … would also save the authors time.
Anna Havron I would happily tell a ton of people about micro.blog, if I felt confident they could figure out how to set up a blog here. Right now, it's much too hard. The only reason I could do it is because a) I have played around with blogs for many years, and b) I really, really wanted to try out micro.blog, so I was more persistent than I would be, normally.
Anna Havron @JMaxB I am not an ex-techie, and have no techie hat. I do not know how to code. The language is written for tech people. Not for people like me.
