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July 2, 2009
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My Opinion on Portfolios

Journal Entry: Thu Jul 2, 2009, 3:24 PM
:iconsolitude12:


Opinion Times
I dislike the new portfolio. Sorry everyone, but I do. Maybe it's because I've got my own portfolio, but I was actually excited for this new portfolio that `TheRyanFord was talking about a couple days ago. What I had in mind was something completely customizable.

Sure, it's customizable. Let's start from the beginning. The Look & Feel page. I liked how it gave you a kind of preview on the side, but the Color Schemes, only two options. Dark and Light? I was expecting it to be a bit more colorful. After all it is a "Color Scheme", where are all the colors? Skipping over Navigational Layout & Thumbnail Location & Font (which were fine), the Font Highlight color: More colors! What about like a color picker or something, a lot of sites have that these days, and it'd be very handy. I dislike the greens used in the "white" color scheme, I'd prefer being able to choose my own color, and not be so limited. Especially because I'm a subscriber, I shouldn't limited (And there are more limitations on the way). Like what about writing CSS or something, like how we can with gallerys and journals. How about a whole portfolio theme gallery! Customization is always a good thing!

Everything else was fine until the Personal Info & Biography pages. Again with the limitations! I have a lot of "areas of expertise" but I can list only a few of them, and I had to order and name them correctly to fit the limit, otherwise one of my areas would be 'photogra'. Yeah, Search engines love that. And I know I can just make different portfolios for different things. But I'd prefer having all of my work in one place, wouldn't you? Biography page. I didn't realize there was a limit, so I ended up with a few errors:
    * Biography is limited to 700 characters, you entered 1866
    * Custom Text 1 is limited to 300 characters, you entered 350
    * Custom Text 2 is limited to 300 characters, you entered 638

I know, I wrote a lot. But still. Why do we need limitations on these? And each new line, tab, and space and everything counts as a character which kind of irks me. Another thing that bothered me was that everytime I fixed it all up, I couldn't get it to stay 700 characters, or 300 characters, because all my apostrophe's would be come ' (I know, escaped, I know what it means), but it shouldn't just show that in the text box, because guess what, it adds on characters, so I'd go and remove all the s, and then I'd find more of them in another box which exceeded the character limit. I was becoming very frustrated at a point when the following happened:


But it's okay, I got through it, the uploading files area was fine. Though for some reason it kept telling me an image was already in my storage, and when I went into my storage, the fifth page in the navigation of my storage had "no results", when I knew that was where that one image that's already in the storage was hiding. I ended up just not using that image, even though I wanted to :(

Then the domains! "Your deviantART username has been reserved with the daportfolio.com domain name, but you may choose any available domain from the dropdown list below." Yes, but what about the other domains, like "cleanfolio.com" or something, I tried "solitude", "soli", etc, but nothing, all of them were already registered, probably because dA usernames weren't just reserved for daportfolio, but all of the other ones as well. Because, as you can see: [link] is available. *grr* I ended up going with:



Not bad, but still, frustrating. In conclusion, I didn't like the new portfolio that much, and I know all the IT staff and CSS staff and all them backend staff at dA worked hard on it, and I'm sorry! This is my opinion of course, I know a lot of people loved it. So that was my long ranting opinion. Carry on with your lives.



Add a Comment:
 
:iconsolitude12:
`Solitude12 Jul 2, 2009  Professional General Artist
I have seen it, there will be an update when Portfolio's is released. :)
Reply
:iconeldris:
~eldris Jul 2, 2009  Hobbyist General Artist
There's supposedly a 200 character limit on the image descriptions too, which is insane. It's not actually working though, which makes me laugh. No error when I deliberately go over.

I know it's in beta, but there's LOADS of obvious errors, like all the "helpful" links on the right in the wizard which have been left as filler javascript alerts :roll:

With all that I still might use it, but they set the images waaay too large, limiting one side to either 1200px or 1600px if you use something from your gallery. I know, I know, I *could* resize them myself an upload them, but it's just so stupid they provide a feature to save time and I end up not being able to use it :dummy:
Reply
:iconmanjyomethunder:
It's a good concept, but it needs development still.
Reply
:iconcmotes:
Remember, it still is beta. At least I think so. :la:
Reply
:iconbrokentutorials:
`BrokenTutorials Jul 2, 2009  Student Digital Artist
also you can't add emotes to your artwork, apperenlty they're too small. which means most emoticonists can't use the new system. :/
Reply
:iconpyritie:
`Pyritie Jul 2, 2009  Hobbyist Digital Artist
That's because there's a deviant called ~solitude :P
Reply
:iconsolitude12:
`Solitude12 Jul 2, 2009  Professional General Artist
Yes, but note it says "Your deviantART username has been reserved with the daportfolio.com domain name, but you may choose any available domain from the dropdown list below." It says nothing about usernames being reserved in other domains. So there should be a solitude.cleanfolio available. DX
Reply
:iconpyritie:
`Pyritie Jul 2, 2009  Hobbyist Digital Artist
:shrug:
Reply
:iconviolentsamurai:
Well, i'm glad you mentioned some of those things.

It IS limiting in a lot of ways, and I know that some of those things were done on purpose, and are probably not going to change.

I'm hoping the fact that this is a "Beta" means that the final version will actually have a few extra features.

An error that bugged me (but mostly because I knew it ahead of time, but forgot when I was actually building it), was the fact that you can only have 18 images per gallery, and only 4 galleries.

Like you, i'd rather be able to put everything into one place.
Reply
:iconikue:
$Ikue Jul 3, 2009  Hobbyist Digital Artist
p.s. sorry that comment turned out so long :S I didn't realize until I sent it. I'm not trying to sound mean or say my stance is the only right one, I'm just voicing an opinion ^^;
Reply
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