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…

@Miraz Yes, I found it a struggle for both of my micro.blog blogs; and Github is incomprehensible to me.

@Miraz it does seem like plugins and themes are very different things that shouldn’t go together

@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.

@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

@annahavron @Miraz Even as a ever-so-slightly-inclined techie, I have no idea how Github works.

@Miraz 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.

@nominal @miraz plug-ins and themes should not be in the same space - or if they are - add ability to filter / because some of the plug-ins are very different to each other … have raised this with ‘appropriate people’ n at least two occasions in the past.

@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.

@JohnPhilpin @nominal I was easily able to filter the list of plugins to just show themes. There's a button right at the top.

@Miraz oh that’s new

@Miraz Yes. The new look on the front page helps though. It’s like it’s saying “We won’t bite you!”.

@odd Yes, that's a good start. But then the experience needs to flow through.

@Miraz 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 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.

@Miraz Definitely. A lot of the bad descriptions for the earlier themes are my fault… Should be easy to update them.

@manton Sounds great! 😀

@Miraz actually plus a standardized list of features and whether the theme supports it out of the box … would also save the authors time.

@JohnPhilpin Yes, exactly.

@Miraz 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.

@annahavron I signed up on M.B a few years ago, and as I remember it, it wasn't very difficult. (Incidentally, I learned about it from @ayjay's blog.) Has something changed? One thing I notice is that theme selection went from clean and simple to pretty opaque. Outside of the theme issue, what are the big roadblocks? Admittedly I'm an ex-techie, and can force myself to put on my techie hat if absolutely necessary. @Miraz

@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.

@annahavron @Miraz It might be good to look at what it's like to set up, say, a Facebook account, something that almost anyone seems able to do, and learn from that process.
Having typed that, I realize that part of me values the niche-y side of Micro.blog and has very mixed feelings about its being wide open to the online public. Helpful to realize that about my own stance.

@manton happy to help on any UX issues if I can.

@Miraz @manton This is why I made sure to document both of my themes really well, such that new users to Micro.blog—or the theme—could have a useful reference. I’m also a stickler for great documentation myself. I agree that more detailed on-boarding and explanations for theming would be really beneficial.