Saturday, September 22, 2012

Fuck you, Blogger.

Long ago we all realized that Google gave up on it's supposed internal motto of "Don't be evil" and embraced the concept of evil as a guiding principle.  It hasn't done them much harm, most people (myself included) use them anyway.

Plus, if you look at the blog polices page you'll find that I'm in business with Amazon too (when I link to an Amazon product if you follow that link and buy it, or something else during that session, I get a cut) so clearly I have little problem working with multiple evil companies.

Now the new blogger interface is better in some ways than the old one.  If you look at some of my earlier posts and look at the downright bizarre formatting they ended up with that arises from a combination of the failings of the old Blogger thingy and my own unwillingness to dive into the html to fix it.

But if they had just made improvements to the post making process it wouldn't be "the new Blogger interface" they changed a hell of a lot more than that.  If I want to look through the texts of multiple posts at the same time, old blogger made it the simplest thing in the world, if there's a way to do it on new blogger I have yet to figure it out.  And I've had a while to try.  For months now I've been using new blogger for composing posts and old blogger for everything else because, with a couple of exceptions (say quickly seeing how many views a given post has), old blogger is simply better.

Viewing and managing comments?  Old blogger, hands down.

In new blogger links within comments don't show up.  This is a problem.  Sometimes the only way to tell the difference between spam and legitimate posts is to see where the link goes.  Generally you don't have to go there, you just have to check the address.  Maybe there's a way to do it somehow, but if there is it's burried in settings somewhere where before it was easy as can be.  As near as I can tell what I will have to do if blogger spamtraps a possibly legitimate comment is remove is flag it as not spam, open the page it is a comment on, and determine if it is spam there, and if it is then go back to the managing comments page to re-flag it as spam.  Before I just had to hover my mouse over the link in the comment.

And it has spamtrapped legitimate comments before.

But for the most part the new blogger is just like the old blogger with a worse layout (the management of space sucks, crushing down things that should rightly be spread out among many other annoying things) that makes it more difficult to navigate (because that's always an improvement) and, oh yeah, a new look.

The look is ugly, and headache inducing.  I said before that it didn't give me personally headaches, but I think what I should have said is that it doesn't give me them quickly because now that I know to pay attention, yes,  it does give me them.  I'm just so used to headaches they don't stand out to me so much.  I normally don't pay attention.

And none of this would lead me to write a post saying, "Fuck you," to the very blog platform I am on.

No, what does that is this.  Google, the owners of blogger, have discovered a way to cause their users physical pain, they have been notified of the problems with their new interface months in advance, their response has basically been, "Fuck off you bastards," and now they've forced everyone into the physical pain causing interface.

And in so doing they've hurt someone that I care about.

I am more inclined to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right myself by abolishing the forms to which I am accustomed.  If it were just annoying, inconveniencing, and yes even hurting me (and it does hurt to look at for any length of time) then I wouldn't speak up.  But when someone I care about is being hurt, that I'm not going to stay silent about.

The only reason I chose blogger in the first place is because it was the platform Ana used.  Now they're hurting Ana.

Not sure what to do, but I had to say something.

4 comments:

  1. I'll make you the same offer I made her: if you need any help with web hosting or CSS or general web backend stuff, let me know, I'm pretty good with web technologies.

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  2. Thank you so much for this. I wanted to compose something at Google, but it just would have been a string of increasingly creative profanities and that didn't seem helpful. This is MUCH better, thank you.

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  3. I don't blog.

    The one thing in favour of blogspot is that I can throw a single RSS feed into my reader to get all comments on all posts. LiveJournal doesn't do that. Dreamwidth doesn't do that.

    If you guys are seriously hassled, I can probably set up some sort of blogging platform on a server I own. Really. It won't be as pretty as this, but it'll have a single admin who actually cares about your user experience. And my charging policy is "pay what it's worth to you, I won't hassle you about it". (this name)@(this name).org will reach me.

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