Rojo, my web based feedreader went offline for most of Sunday in a scheduled upgrade. Recently they were acquired by industry notables Six Apart, and announced there would be improvements to the service in September. I am unsure as yet if these are the final changes, but I was actually quite disappointed in the changes from both a usability and accessibility perspective.

The first thing that annoys me and has done in the past is their server management. When they take the system down, they must relocate their holding page to another server, which clearly can't cope with demand despite the short amount of text it provides. I know this because it can take two or three minutes to get a page that finally says, "Sorry, we're doing some maintenance" (or along those lines), that is if you get it at all and the page doesn't time out.

The niggles with the update are more fundamental. For those who are unfamiliar, Rojo provides two main pages when logged in. The first is the 'homepage' and is an expandable list of headlines of articles that Rojo users are 'Mojoing' - or basically favouriting. Enough users clicking the Mojo button moves them onto the homepage. I don't use this facility so can't comment if there are any improvements here.

The more important second page (the one I use all the time) contains the same setup with all my feeds in. With the old design you would have a big article title, with an expand to full article '+' image on left left and a 'Mojo This' image link on the right. It was easy, following standard implementations of tree structures. But they decided to change this.

The new version moved the 'Mojo This' link to the left, where the old expand and collapse link was. They smartened up the image as well, but got rid of the text that tells you what the button does, and stuck the number of Mojo votes below the icon, unlabelled. So immediately I'm trying to click there to expand the article and I can't.

This problem is compounded by the removable of the old +/- system, which has been replaced with a small rectangular (image) button below the 'Mojo This' link with the text READ or CLOSE depending on it's state. Being the most used button it would make sense to keep the hit area the same, but although it has been elongated, height-wise it is more fiddly to locate than the taller square shaped button that it has replaced. These are real usability problems.

Secondly, in this new version, you can now choose to have up to 100 feed stories on one page. I like this idea, and so whacked up my stories-per-page number. Now before it used to be set at around 20 (I can't remember exactly), and when all the stories were expanded the page got looooong. So much so that I would often use the Skip to Top link provided at the bottom of the articles. Now I have the option to set the number to higher than 20, the page gets even looooooonger, by 400% infact. So why, oh why, did they decide to remove the Skip to Top link? It now takes half an hour to get back to the top of the page. This is both a usability and accessibility mistake.

As far as I can see, the improvements made have been weak if not detrimental to the service. One thing that has always got me about Rojo is that it can go down for maintenance, and does, and often when it does, it goes down for longer than it says it will. This is something a offline reader can offer that Rojo can't. However, there is an appeal to be able to read your feeds wherever you are, and Rojo offers more than my inbuilt Yahoo Mail Beta feed reader.

Will I stick with them? I'm not sure. I've been thinking about changing for a while now. This isn't the killer reason for me to go, but it may just be my inquisitive nature that will eventually lure me away to pastures greener.