When you accept a friend request on Facebook, you’re given the option to add detail about how you know that person. You used to be able to add ‘We hooked up’ here. Today I discovered that this option is missing:

Panicking that my whole list of hookups would have disappeared from Facebook, I rushed over to check my complete friend list. Luckily, the hookup data is still there. What’s more, at this point you can then go into the ‘edit details’ of how you know someone and put the hookup info in there:

I wonder why they removed the hookup option from one dialogue and left it in another? Unless this was an accident?  I know sometimes Facebook give different features to different users depending on age and/or country, so maybe this has something to do with that?  Does anyone else get the option to have ‘hooked up’ with someone they accept friendship from in the initial ‘add details’ dialogue anymore?

And here’s another example of a failed sign up dialogue in terms of identity politics and gender diversity:

Radio buttons? With only two options and I have to choose one? And the default is Male? So I’m forced to declare myself as one or the other. How rubbish. Here’s a couple of suggestions for improvement:

Or even better:

Or even don’t bother asking in the first place! At least not in the initial sign up. You could let people enter this information about themselves by choice later on. So far Pownce is winning the gender game. I know I keep reporting on all the sign-up dialogues being crap for promoting gender diversity, but when I’ve seen enough of these I think I’ll make a table of winners and losers in gender awareness in sign ups / personal profile sites’ UI.

_____________EDIT______________

Aha! on logging in, turns out you can un-define your gender in your profile settings.  So that is a good thing, but you still shouldn’t have to choose one in the first place.  It’s a bit weird that you can choose ‘nothing’ later on, but not initially.  Also it’s still not perfect because you might want to define yourself as Transgendered or something else and because you can’t this is giving preferential treatment to males and females.

So I made a custom size del.icio.us Widgetbox widget for my Ning profiles, but Widgetbox won’t put it in their gallery because the links don’t open in a new window. I added the code they provide to make it do this but it appears not to work. I think because the links are being created by the del.icio.us javascript rather than already being in the widget. Does anyone know how to fix this? The other del.icio.us tagroll widget must have managed it because it’s in the Widgetbox gallery, but you can’t resize that one on Ning. Here’s my code:

<script>
	var i;
	var aTags = document.getElementsByTagName(“a”);
	for (i=0; i < aTags.length; i++) {
		aTags[i].setAttribute(“target”, “_new”);
	}

	var areaTags = document.getElementsByTagName(“area”);
	for (i=0; i < areaTags.length; i++) {
		areaTags[i].setAttribute(“target”, “_new”);
	}
</script>
<div style="padding:7px;font-family:Arial;
width:${config.width}px;">
  <script type="text/javascript"
src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/tags/${config.username}
?count=${config.number};
size=${config.minimum}-${config.maximum};
color=${config.little-colour}-${config.big-colour};
title=${config.title};name">
</script>
  </div>

_____________________________EDIT___________________________

Solution! OK so I wrote to Widgetbox support eventually and they’ve helped loads.  They’ve now added a ‘code snippet’ inserter into the widget code editor which adds the correct code for making links open in a new window.  Apparently the problem was with copy-pasting the code into my widget made the quotes into speech marks  rather than those code type straight quotes.  So now that’s fixed.  BUT sometime in the last week the actual widget itself has broken on Ning.  The widget is fine on Widgetbox, but even the ‘add to Ning’ option has disappeared.  I can’t find an ‘add to Ning’ option on any of the other widgets either so I wonder if Ning has changed something and become incompatible?  Anyway, I’ve asked Widgetbox about this again so bear with me and I’ll let you know what they say…

So I’m a member of a few Ning sites and I really like it.  In trying to edit my profile, I have managed to import my regular blog here into the standard Ning RSS widget.  But you only get one Ning RSS widget.  So for a work-related Ning community like ELESIG, I wanted to show my work blog too.  You get a Ning Text Box widget on your Ning profile which supports embedded widgets from external sites, so I’ve used yourminis RSS widget to import my SPLASH project blog.  yourminis widgets are nice because you can template them really easily to match their destination or leave them in a minimal format.  The only difficult thing here was to get the size right on the yourminis site because you can’t resize them once you’ve embedded them on the destination page.  The next thing I wanted to do was to put a tag cloud of my del.icio.us links on my Ning page.  The standard del.icio.us provided javascript code is stripped from the Ning Text Box widget so that didn’t work.  I couldn’t find a yourminis del.icio.us widget but I found a Widgetbox one.  Again this provides javascript code which is stripped by Ning, but Widgetbox does give you an opensocial URL which should allow you to embed a Widgetbox widget in a Ning site.  But I don’t get what I’m supposed to do with this URL.  Widgetbox says ‘Click the “Copy” button and then paste the url on Ning to add the app”.  OK but where on Ning do I paste it?  I tried the Ning Text Box widget but this just writes the URL out unformatted.  Hmm.  Anybody know how to put a tag cloud of del.icio.us links onto a Ning profile?  Or what I’m supposed to do with the Widgetbox URL for Ning?

Tags: ning, opensocial, widgets, widgetbox, javascript, embed, elesig, rss, yourminis