Top 5 Ways HubPages Could Improve

Note: This Hub was written before the April 2009 redesign and many of its criticisms were successfully addressed!

As I stated in the last Hub, Top 5 Reasons Why HubPages Is The Best, HubPages is one helluva site. If you know your stuff and have the chops, you never need to look at any other blogging platform. HubPages rules! However, nothing under the sun is perfect, so here are the Top 5 Ways HubPages Could Improve:

1) Now You See Them Now You Don't Double Paragraph Spaces: Enter your text in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer or pretty well any major word processor. Select, copy and paste into your Hub text entry box and save. Where did those big double spaces between paragraphs come from? Now reopen your text box, save again and close. The huge double spaces are gone! But if you reopen the text box again, they'll return! And no matter how many new versions of the text editor are introduced, this irritant never seems to go away. Grrrr....

2) Screen Positioning: HubPages has to be one of the last major websites in the world that doesn't center float its content. Everything is always scrunched over to the extreme left hand side of the window, just like it was in the early Mozilla days. The difference is that although at that time the average screen resolution may have been 800 x 600, when you're accessing HubPages on my 24" 1920 x 1200 monitor, you'll throw the right side of your neck out unless you scrunch down your browser window and specifically center it.

3) Teeny Text Box: The postage stamp text entry box is also a hangover from the 800 x 600 days. On my screen, it's like entering text into a peephole. All it would take is to make that box a resizable window and it would make it much easier to deal with text.

4) Blinkin' Linkage: The link entry box is quite limiting. You have to enter your linkages one by one instead of in any form of bulk, as there is no easy way to do more than one link at a time. I use an awkward workaround: I create a simple HTML page in Notepad, insert all the A HREF links, save it, open it in a browser, copy the links from the browser display window, and then into a Hub. However, there's no reason to make things this difficult.

5) Templating: Although the founders of HubPages may not have taken it into consideration when they were first setting up the site, the platform becomes very clumsy once Hubbers such as myself are approaching the 1,000 Hub mark as it is impossible to apply most attributes to more than one Hub at a time. Keep in mind that I was previously wrong about not being able to apply Categories to more than one Hub at a time, as that can be done. However, it would be nice to extend this functionality to other aspects.

There are other improvements I could suggest, such as incorporating a running word count in the text entry box; having Comments be settable to Moderate by default as well as keeping all shown Comments displayed if the status is changed to Moderate; fixing the #%&$ News Capsule that works only when it feels like it; ensuring the Capsule Ordering doesn't get stuck all the time; and having the first click on the top column header in Traffic Statistics go to the highest, not lowest sorting first (after all, I almost always want to see my highest ranking hubs before I want to see my lowest ranking ones)... but the factors I've just listed above are definitely the Big 5.

Still, when I weigh the relatively minor irritants against the overwhelming positives of HubPages, I simply have to repeat the conclusion I reached earlier: HubPages Rules!