Hey, Slideshare: Keep your act together!

It’s been a while since I’ve been planning migrating my talks from my Slideshare to my Speakerdeck (I’ll do it, I promise!) and as time passes, Slideshare keeps pushing me away.

Aside from a few problems I’ve been having with them in the past, like their upload button just failing to work on Firefox (it does now) I just witnessed something truly horrible today:

Opened Slideshare, clicked login. Nothing happened aside form their home just reloading. Clicked again… same thing: home reloads and I’m not shown as logged in. Already pissed off that once again Slideshare gives me such a pain on something that should be simple, I just go to to FF’s addressbar and type my profile URL. Guess what? I arrive there and I’m shown as logged in.

To witness a behaviour like this is disturbing since either a) They rely heavily on some cookie to make things work properly and the detection of that cookie is bugged, b) This is the result of some crappy JS click event handler combined with some preventDefault or c) both.

Whatever the reason, it’s unnaceptable that web apps keep screwing up what should be simple. Stop overdoing things, people! A click is a click. Cookies are nice, but you must know their limits and how to use them properly.

Things like this is what pushes me to Speakerdeck: It’s way more efficient and elegant, not to mention the absence of stupid ads all over the place. I just wish Speakerdeck would have shown earlier so I would never need to go through the pain of migrating a lot of talks, some which I don’t even have the original slides anymore.