How does PS1’s web site bite? Let me count the ways… rudely.

1. Splash page (need I say more?)

2. Cheese ball flash animation announcing GNY2005 [Greater New York is a kind of Whitney Biennial for New York artists, held at PS1 in Queens, the Museum of Modern Art's "alternative space." This is the second; the first, a perceived "career launcher," took place in 2000. --tm]

3. Evil pop-up from cheese ball flash animation announcing GNY2005

4. The artist list in the stupid pop-up from the cheese ball flash animation doesn’t do anything! Yes you can rollover an artist’s name and it lights up, but a click does… nothing!

5. The exhibition section just has the stinking press release? How about some friendly copy (and larger text). PLUS, the navigation of stinking press release is too small and too confusing (the page you’re on should be highlighted not the page you’re not on, duh!).

6. Why is there a ‘press’ section when the exhibition section already has the press release? Oh, I see, so you could put a really big dumb graphic that says ‘Press, Greater New York 2005’, which clicks off to MOMA’s site.

7. At least make the friggin’ top-left logo clickable back to the homepage for chrissakes! This has been web-site navigation convention from before the turn of the century!

8. It don’t validate. (snigger, snigger) And it’s so f’d up, it would be hard to figure out where to start.

9. Change your meta-tags now! NOW! NOW! NOW! (It’s a shame to see the free and open-source Mambo put to such wicked uses.)

Ahhhh. That felt good.

oh my goodness. This does seem to be getting around. Well, maybe it will lead to them fixing their website...

Why did you remove the disclaimer on the end? :)
- twhid (guest) 3-13-2005 8:39 pm

And while we're at it, eybeam's Reblogers have to start casting thier net a little widder. All they do is put up Tom Moody's page over and over and over. Okay maybe in this case it was a coincidence but I'm still right. The only time we went more than two days without seeing Tom's site was when Tom was the reblooger.
- joester 3-13-2005 9:59 pm

twhid, your "rudely" in the first line lets people know you're being caustic, but the disclaimer undercuts what I think are valid and well-said criticisms! For practically nothing MOMA could have set up a Movable Type or Word Press blog with categories down the side and a few permanent pages covering the issues they needed to cover and it would have looked 10 times more elegant. Plus it would be dynamic--it could be easily updated as press and artist bios are added. I realize not everyone gets blogging or has time to retool, but you'd think powerful tastemakers would be up on design trends, instead of stuck 5 years in the past with the dot-com model that wasn't that good to begin with. It's like hearing the FBI still uses equipment from the 70s when you thought they were the all-seeing eye. I leave aside, for now, the larger issue of GNY2005 being retrograde in other ways, such as doing massive slide reviews when so much info on (current) artists is available online.

Joe, I forget, we're friends, right?

- tom moody 3-13-2005 10:24 pm

Still puzzling over this crack: "All they do is put up Tom Moody's page over and over and over. Okay maybe in this case it was a coincidence but I'm still right." If you're saying they reBlogged me twice in a row look again. They reBlogged the MTAA item, then they reBlogged my item on castlezzt.net, then I re-reBlogged the MTAA item, pointlessly clever bastard that I am. Anyway, thanks, I'm sure they won't touch me for a while now, in the interests of "casting a wider net."

- tom moody 3-14-2005 1:57 am

As the "they" who's been reBlogging Tom's stuff, what can I say? I like his blog. Though to be precise, I reBlogged him, I think, twice in the past week, along (re)posts about flavored communion wafers and "it's time i learned your name chinese laundry man". The harder thing has been to catch memes before they go through the massive filter that is BoingBoing. Curse you BoingBoing!
- francis hwang 3-14-2005 4:55 am

Thanks, Francis, for setting the record straight. I enjoyed your stint reBlogging, although I'm sure my friends would say that's a hopelessly biased comment. I was trying to imagine, during my 3 weeks reBlogging last Sept., how I would react to someone ragging "in jest" about my hitting certain bloggers "over and over and over" (e.g., Screenfull, Chris Ashley, Wooster Collective, Cory Arcangel, others). I think I would say "fuck'em, I'm gonna put up the stuff I like." On the content-producing side, I've tried to explain to joester--who doesn't listen--that a number of eyebeam reBloggers HAVE NOT liked my site and I've had stretches where only googlers come to this page looking for funnycats.wmv. Those were dark, lonely months, but I kept plugging away. I'm certainly not getting picked up by Boingboing and the like, so getting over-reBlogged is the least of my worries. Some people just have to bust your chops. "In jest."

- tom moody 3-14-2005 6:52 am

re: Tom: The Most reblogged blogger, i heard tom was bribing the rebloggers with posts that they are interested in and that is why he's been reblogged so much :)

+++

re: my disclaimer... I thought it was obvious my little rant was 1/2 a parody of myself with actual valid points thrown in but I wanted to make it really, really obvious for those that may wish to overlook the obvious (you know who you are).

+++

re: using MT or Wordpress. They *are* using a very good open source CMS platform, Mambo, so they began on the right path... they just fucked it up.
- twhid 3-15-2005 5:32 pm

dear twhid,

your piece was obvious and self-effacing. but now your starting to sound chicken. satirists must be brave. be brave, FTW.


- bill 3-15-2005 6:19 pm

I love Tom's Blog, (although for some reason the comments pages takes way too long to open for me)(I know its a safari thing probably but I don't have that problem on sally's site). My compaint was really a backhanded complimnets geared towards tom. My only real copmplaint with eyebeam, is that I already read Tom's blog and when they use him I'm always wondering where I've seen that before even though it was just a few seconds ago. And when alchohol gets involved it can compaound the problem. Really if you want to get technical the proiblem is mine, but if you complain aobut yourself you sound like a winer.


- joester 3-17-2005 11:47 pm

saltz weighs in
- bill 3-29-2005 5:33 pm