XTRA article

[danaeris]

My XTRA article is now visible on their main page, entitled "Rejected from the personals"

www.xtra.ca

It can also be seen on P. 20 of the current print edition in Toronto; dunno about Ottawa and Vancouver, but I believe it was a national story.

Comments

[ex-sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

Cool! But what were your criteria for judging whether a service or site was trans-friendly?

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Complicated!

And, I don't have my notes with me. I'll try to remember to post that later in response to this comment, because we had specific questions we asked, and assigned a point value to every single question, and then converted that into the word ratings.

[ex-sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

Interesting!

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

The questions:
1. (2 points) Can identify as some form of trans
2. (2 points) Can identify as specific form of trans (ie. different checkboxes for intersexed, transexual, transgendered, transvestite, cross-dresser, genderfuck... no one had ALL of these options, but some had a few iirc)
3. (2 points) Can identify as trans AND male or female
4. (1 point) Can search for some form of trans
5. (1 point) Can search for specific form of trans (originally meant this to refer back to question 2, but I think I may have given points for searching for question 3 as well, given how low all the sites were scoring and the fact that I had forgotten to include a separate search question for it!)
6. (-2 points) Lumps TV/CD in with TS (if they did this explicitly, they lost the points, but if they just said "trans" or "transgender", they did not)

I made up the questions with a little consultation from rbowspryte, and then she assigned the point values (and okay'd the questions).

[jackspryte.livejournal.com]

Yey! I am so proud!

[aberrantvirtue.livejournal.com]

I love your closing line in the box.

Love muffin! Hee! (It's makin' me smile all the way to work.)

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Yay! Making my friends smile is soooo worth it.

[cos]

Nice article. I didn't know that about match.com. Nice plug for OkCupid :)

What awful back-end tech on that web site, though! It has ugly URLs and requires the SESSIONID paramter or it won't show the article. Which means everyone will have a different link to the same article. Aside from being ugly, it doesn't play well with tagging services like del.icio.us. And what good is a SESSIONID when people trade links around the net? Yuck. Do you have any connection with their tech people?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_duncan/]

Seconded. Would it have killed them to include a "link to this page"?

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And, I will pass on technical comments to my editor.

[blackorchid1.livejournal.com]

I was surprised that you didn't try LavaLife, but only because I used to work there.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

We did, and it scored so low that we didn't even bother putting it on the chart. There were a number of sites that were like that.

[blackorchid1.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. How come you didn't just say that?

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

There isn't room in the article to list every site that scores poorly for folks like us... it would be a list as long as my arm, if we tested all of the sites out there (which we didn't).

The list was a list of places that had scored well, not a list of all the places we had tested. I think that the sidebar is pretty clear on that, actually.