Even though this blog is in WordPress, most of the other blogs I write or co-write are on Blogger. I stayed in Old Blogger as long as possible – when I briefly switched, about two months ago, I admit to being a tad confused, and switched back almost immediately – but now, all the blogs have the New Blogger board.
My intern at work was having fits. For everything she wrote, there were no page breaks. So I finally sat down and actually looked at the post settings, on the right of the screen. The bottom button gives one the option to either add page breaks – tiresome and tedious, and the default setting – or Press ENTER for line breaks, which is what I had always done. It was my major problem besides the Post Settings box seeming to jump to the left and right, opposite whatever direction I pointed the cursor; still annoying. But not enough to mention. But that Send Feedback button in the bottom right of the screen – is there any way to get RID OF IT?
Oh, and someone else was having difficulty I was not, which was getting to the editing page of the posts.
So I was humored by the fact that SamuraiFrog was complaining that people were complaining about Blogger; terribly meta. I was amused because I hadn’t seen any complaints at that point. THEN Ken Levine expressed his displease with Blogger (and Facebook, and rightly so); I did, though, solved one of his frustrations, and he thanked me in the comments. Dustbury cites Roberta X’s disdain. Demeur got so ticked off that he gave Blogger the middle finger and started a WordPress blog.
I do understand the ire. My complaint with the new Blogger is not that it’s new. It’s the fact that it’s new and largely unimproved, with changes that were not at all intuitive.
Something that REALLY annoys me on the Internet are those lists where you have to click on a dozen or more pages to get to “the Answer”. One of them Jaquandor pointed to, the ranking of Stephen King’s books. At least the slideshow goes five books at a time, but there seems to be no book at all in 2nd place.
Now this a good and proper thing to do. That Texts from Hillary page has hung it up.
“As far as memes go – it has gone as far as it can go. Is it really possible to top a submission from the Secretary herself? No. But then when you get to text with her in real life – it’s just over. At least for us. But we have no doubt it will live on with all of you on the Internet.”
I found the New(est) Blogger confusing at first, too, but I switched permanently when I wanted a feature that was only on the new(est) version. It did take awhile to figure out (the line break thing was one of them). Mostly, though, I wasn’t too upset because over the years I learned the best way to write a post offline, what HTML to hand-code, those sorts of things, and those were all the same (or even easier, actually).
My attitude comes down to this: How much am I paying Google for this service? I can put up with inconvenience considering how much value I get for free (actually, I’m amazed that they still don’t require us to have ads on our blogs). Blogger is far from perfect, but there there’s no such thing as perfect, especially in free services (WordPress has its faults, too, after all; my podcasts are all on WordPress, so I get annoyed with it, too).
I haven’t used Blogger for some years, so I’m not really in a position to comment, but I note that one of SamuraiFrog’s complaints is about the problem he has when composing his posts in Word. In my experience, this is always a bad idea as Word carries over lots of annoying HTML. I know WordPress has a ‘paste from Word’ tool, but I don’t entirely trust it!
As a WordPress user, I can’t comment on how Blogger works. I only know it’s sometimes very difficult to post comments on Blogger blogs. If I have to hassle with it too much, I tend to just move on.
I’d like to use blogger. If I have to change to WordPress I ‘ll st op writing.
My only major complaint with New(est) Blogger is that it was really hard to turn off my CAPTCHAs on comments after they switched to more annoying ones. (You have to temporarily revert to Old Blogger to do it, as there is no option for it in the New(est) Blogger settings for them.) Other than that, I’m fine with it. I actually prefer the new picture-posting interface.