Petter Nilsen

My impressions about my.opera.com

Monday, February 6, 2006 3:16:14 AM

I used this weekend to setup my, up until now, inactive blog to have some content and some style. In the process, I made some observations:

Positive

General feeling is that it's great. Many nice touches like the friends list (and friends' friends list), styling, themes etc.
It looks GOOD.

Bug?

Upload zip files with images for the album doesn't appear to work. Maybe there need to be a specific folder structure in the file? I don't know.

Negative

Because the themes seems to use shaded white between the header and the content/blog part, it's not possible to easily change the background colour of the area where the main content is. The sticky image and other images are not transparent.

Wishlist

Make it possible to have multiple styles assigned to each person. This would make it possible to create a xmas style, a summer style, etc. and switch between them at appropiate times.
Make it possible to share these styles with people on the friends list.
Make it possible to use templated keywords in the stylesheets. Instead of writing "background: #FFFFFF", I could write "background: ${backgroundcolour}" and define the value for "backgroundcolour" somewhere else. This would make it easier to reuse certain values throughout the stylesheet. This will also allow for easier tweaks for the user that doesn't want to dive headfirst into CSS.
As an extension to the above, you could assign a template keyword to a uploaded picture and use the keyword in the stylesheet.
As a further extension to the above, this would make it easier to pick sub-sections of a theme. For instance, if you want a menu from theme A, but want to use it in theme B. I guess it would require some rewriting of the default styles...
Make it possible to disable the album slideshow.

But all in all, I'm very pleased with the features available.

Search engines in Opera 9 Technology Preview 2It's really a lot of snow here at Opera HQ

Comments

scipio # Thursday, February 9, 2006 8:33:54 PM

I must say that it took me a few days to get used to it, but I'm quite impressed as well. I've experimented with the styling, but after discovering it's a lot of work to write a stylesheet from scratch I settled with a modified version of one of the default styles - a bit like you did, actually.