I, Roboto

I have four unrelated blogging issues on my mind, so I'm going to bundle them together for an end of 2017 December blog post, one of my occasional gripe sessions about Google. 

Once again I looked at the HTML for a blog post I was writing and found it inexplicably "decorated" with formatting that I did not add. I previously blogged about this phenomenon back in 2013. Here we are in 2017 and the Blogger user interface still does not even try to proved a "what you see is what you get" blogging platform. It would be depressing to know how many times I have to "preview" each blog post while I am composing it so that I can actually see how the text and images will come together. I suppose it is all wasted effort anyhow because Google believes that its (Chrome) browser should control the font selection not a human blogger. This time when I looked under the hood there were hundreds of lines of silly formatting code instructions like this:

Thank you Google. Until I searched the interwebs for "roboto" I had no idea that the many tentacled Google runs an operation devoted to fonts. The first time I ever thought about fonts was back in 1983 when I started using QuickDraw. That was a simpler era (in black and white), but the folks at Apple tried to give us a WYSIWYG interface.

Gripe 2

welcome to the future

Every couple of months, the good folks at Blogger make a change to the way they deliver blog pages to users. One of the more annoying is shown above. A while back they put into the blogging user interface an orange "floating" button (it used to say "complain to Google") for feedback (see the image, above). Not a bad idea, except that button can cover up other parts of the user interface, such as some of the options for managing images that are in blog posts.

Recently, they once again changed their delivery of blog pages so that it triggers NoScript every time a page comes to my computer from Blogger.

source

Google Photo
Full disclosure: I don't use Google Photo for photos. I do store images from my blog, particularly those that I archive as "Posters" and those that are mostly "Book and Magazine Covers". Two years ago I blogged about being forced by Google to use Google Photo.

100 poster images

I recently reached 100 images in my archive of posters. Normally I like to celebrate arbitrary numerical milestones, but instead I have to complain.

For a long time after Google began badgering me to use Google Photo (faster! better!) I resisted; there were annoying bugs in their software (at least for a Firefox user). Eventually, they fixed the bugs and I started making links to my (public) images in Google Photo. Only later did I discover that people following those links were being harassed by Google and told to login to Google Photo. I'm still in the process of trying to find and remove all of my links to Goggle Photo from this blog. Another fine waste of time. Thanks Google.

ghost image

Not WYSIWYG

Blogger

Recently I composed a long and complex blog post with dozens of images. It is not unusual for me to insert one image into a new blog post, then decide that the image needs to be changed. There is a bug in Blogger that sometimes fails to cleanly remove images (see the example, shown above this paragraph).

Using my usual browser on my computer, the blog post looked fine, but when I used another browser, one of the "deleted" images was still showing up. How annoying! The original (too dark) image was called "ad4" and the replacement was "ad42". I remember that when I tried to delete "ad4" I had to do it twice before it actually left my screen. Little did I know that a ghost image was still lurking in the HTML code. Here is the "deleted" code:

"deleted" image code hi-lighted in yellow.

There is a bug in Blogger that incorrectly "captures" formatting from one part of a blog post and spreads it to another part. I suppose they are well aware of all these defects in the Blogger software, but the interns at Google probably can't figure out how to fix the code. I'm planning to start a new project/blog soon; I'll try one of Blogger's newer templates and see if it has the same problems as the legacy template that I now use.

Unrelated reading: ever feel like you are stuck in Googatory?
Next: stuck in star wars purgatory.

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