Flex Developer’s Journal Plays “Find the Content”
Was doing some Googling for Flex tips on how to do something (what it was now, I don’t really recall)… Something about tooltip styling, placement etc for components… Anyway, cames across a link to what seemed like a useful article at a reputable sounding site, “Flex Developers Journal“. Problem was, I couldn’t find it. Everything was covered in or by ads… 3 Video ads (one of which autoplayed audio), A coupleGoogle boxes, a popover interstitial and some other “advertorial” type content. Ugh. No thanks. Didn’t even stick around for the article. On top of it, they set 8 cookies in my browser for this one page. 8! Take a look at this screenshot (click to enlarge)
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Posted on March 27, 2008
Bill White Mar 28
Yep, the folks that run the Flex Developer’s Journal are really lame.
First of all, this ‘publication’ is backed by sys-con, which publishes all of those ‘developer journals’ for different programming languages. The sys-con website is absolutely unusable. There is so many adds and so many scripts running in the background that my browser crashes half the time. About 70% of the site’s content is ads and redirects. The site has to be the worst I’ve ever seen. They should be ashamed.javascript:void(0)
To make things worse, when they first announced the pending publication of Flex Developer’s Journal, I eagerly subscribed. After 6 months, I still had not received a single issue. I emailed them repeatedly and after the fourth email, I finally got someone who said that sys-con had ‘ceased publication of Flex Developer’s Journal’. Really? Apparently it never got off the ground. After about 4 weeks, they finally refunded my $129 fee. I would have never gotten it back had I not pursued them about it. Nice way to treat their customers.
Joeflash Mar 29
I installed the Flashblock extension specifically for this site… once that’s turned on it’s actually not bad, with the annoying video ads blissfully silent. It’s like a flashback to the “Flash 99% bad” days. Surprised they don’t have a skip intro to go with all the unusability.
And I love how they co-op blog content to get eyeballs to their site; whether every piece is actually there “by permission of the author,” one never knows.
The ColdFusion community in particular has no lost love for sys-con and their questionable practises, but way too many lines of text have been wasted on them already. Most of the content on that site is freely available elsewhere if you know where to look.