Ok.
QQing about InkBunny without looking at technical merits is funny.
Let's look at the technical side of things, and the list of thoughts I've got about the site.
7) Dog slow.
* The site has been dog slow since I've been able to get to it. I'm not sure if it's a bandwidth issue, or if the processor(s) on the server(s) of choice are having a hard time handling a load of requests all at once. I can click a link and generally expect to wait about 25 seconds for a page load. I took a free moment to start a page load, but kill it as soon as the page actually rendered, minus the picture. Loading the picture by itself, it still took about 17 seconds for a 441kb PNG to load, which is pretty sluggish. I suspect it's just the newness of the site that is causing the performance bog, though, and expect it to come back up to more acceptable speeds in the near future.
Looks like it might be a combo of both, after all. 2000+ users signing up in the first day does have a fair chance to throttle the hell out of anything that's just starting. :)
6) Dog ate the URL.
* mod_rewrite the URLs, please? site.tld/filename.language?variable=variable2 is so last decade. Plus, if you decide to move from one scripting language to another, references break on the USER-facing side (Ask FA about that -- they did it once in their infancy, too). It'd be nice to turn on mod_rewrite this early in the lifecycle, since people expect betas to break, often for the better (and personally, I'd think that site.tld/variable/variable2 would look a lot better to share).
5) Dog ate the code.
* It's more of a minor nitpick than anything else. But all those random injections of <style> throughout the page? Just toss those into a stylesheet, please. It makes it easier for those of us planning on writing Stylish or Greasemonkey scripts, knowing that things can be isolated down to a specific location.
4) That's a tall Dog.
* From the bottom of my tab bar to the top of the information bar for any given picture... I can fit my credit card in the space horizontally. On FA, I can fit 2/3 of my credit card in the same space. This is on a Dell S2009w display at optimal resolution (1600x900 pixels), with the window maximized on the display. Taskbar for my OS isn't present, and zoom level on both sites is at normal, in Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 (Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3).
* It doesn't sound like a problem, until you realize that more information is delivered in less space on FA, compared to InkBunny. Why it becomes important is simple: not everyone is blessed with a 1600x900 display. Some people are still using 800x600 (I know, but you can't make someone not have a visual impairment with the wave of a magical crotch-carrot, InkBunny).
3) At least the Dog's not fat.
* This is a double-edged sword, and actually ties in to the Tall commentary. Flexible designs will win at the end of the day. When I get bored and span my browser across both monitors, I'd like to not see the background for forever and a thin column of materials in the middle. I can do this with FA, but the fixed column look of IB prevents this.
2) This Dog likes to read!
* I'm not going to point at all the terrible things without pointing out some of the good stuff. The reader, when users upload text files at least, is pretty damn nice. I'd love it if access keys were used, too, for less mouse abuse to read. I think with enough CSS abuse, the stories could be shown two pages at a time, but that level of work is a bit excessive, all things considered.
1) Giraffe on Squirrel.
* InkBunny has some boots to grow into. Technically, it offers some things that are rather neat (the ability to sell prints with an integrated cart system? nice. separation of streaming journals from regular journals, with autodeletion? nice), when compared to things we're used to seeing elsewhere. InkBunny also appears to have a niche that it will fill at least partially. For the ones mature enough to just filter out the works they don't want to see, they have a marketplace for others that are mature enough to do the same.
* At the same time, the list that I went through points out things that I feel are missing, in general. I can only hope that the negatives are taken with a grain of salt, and result in me being served fixes for some of the more noticeable things.
* Yes. No dog for this point. :P
