Blogger in the Age of Smart Phones

the Blogger Blog

I occasionally blog about the Blogger blogging platform because it is what powers the wikifiction blog. Today I was greeted by a notice from Blogger saying that I would soon be forced to use "the new Blogger".....

loss of control

A month or so previously, I tried the "new Blogger" and immediately went back to using the older interface. I've gone through this kind of software change before and learned not to be an early adopter. "Early adopter" means that that you get to complain bitterly about "enjoy" all the bugs that are still in the new software. 

Smart Phone Interface
I have no interest in using a smart phone for creating new blog posts.

a draft blog post

The "new Blogger" had been stripped of functionality to make it work "better" with smart phones. A casual glance at the new system for blog comment moderation failed to reveal how you can actually approve a comment. I know how to do approve comments with the old interface, but many of the old controls have been removed from the new dumbed-down streamlined interface.

Above. Current blogger interface: more information, less white space. A draft post: Litless Toru.

New interface. Three new blog posts under construction: Toddarro Mansion, One Ring, Shop the NAC.

icons

I often have several new blog posts that are under construction. In the new interface, there is less textual information provided, but a big "smart phone friendly" icon-like image for each blog post. Rather than show a complete list of labels for a blog post, there are two buttons; the first shows an actual label and the second button simply says "more". Notice (above) that since I am using a desktop computer with a nice wide screen, the "new Blogger" interface gives me plenty of empty white screen space while NOT showing me the labels. In short, the crappy smart phone interface annoys me.

floating + button

Also notice in the image above that since smart phone users can't read don't have room on their tiny screens for actual words, there is a continuing proliferation of lame icons (highlighted in orange boxes). Jimmy the intern at Blogger also decided to add an annoying floating + button that hides information which should be displayed on my screen.

edit HTML

There are new blog post formatting options (mostly hidden away) for the "new Blogger" such as the ability to create tables. The "edit HTML" mode has been beefed up with color, line numbers and a "search and replace" feature.

Floating preview pallet

image resizing controls

Preview

The blog post preview system has been changed. There is now a floating tool pallet that can provide previews suited for users with small smart phone screens.

The default for previews is no longer to put a preview in a new browser tab. However, you do have the option of placing previews in a new tab by right-clicking on the preview icon. The preview icon looks like the old page-views icon.

There are new controls for changing the size of images in a blog post. Strangely, the old (and useful) option for setting the image size to the "original" pixel size is gone.

Blogger Bug Festival

a detached image caption: "image resizing controls"

more icons!

Currently, there is a bug in the "new Blogger" software that impacts captions for images. One problem causes text formatting near an image to bleed over into the image caption. You can also end up with a caption that gets entirely detached from an image and begins to have a life of its own in your blog post. Such a detached image caption becomes invisible while in the blog post editor. Definitely not WYSIWYG.

There is a new system for positioning where images appear in a blog post. For some reason, the "new Blogger" can fail to insert images at the current cursor position. Well, I've now managed to break two different image captions, so it must be time for me to return to the "old" Blogger.

even more icons!

Lesson learned (again): I won't be switching to the "new Blogger" until they force me to make the switch. What are the chances that all the bugs will have been fixed by then? In estimating that probability, it is a good thing that I'm experienced thinking small.

Tales of the Ret'fai network

Related Reading: the endless icons of Twitter

Next: the Ret'fai network

support.google.com (click image to enlarge)

Note: on July 29th, the good bots at Blogger switched me to using the new interface. However, I switched back to the old. 😊

July 10, 2020

July 29th, 2020

that pencil means "edit"

September 4th, 2020. For the past month, one of the basic features of the Blogger interface has been broken. The edit button at the bottom of each existing blog post has not been working. However, today when I tried using that button to edit an old blog post from January, it worked. The only problem now is, if I use that button then I am automatically forced to use the "new" Blogger.

pain: available automatically

Apparently someone at Blogger went ahead and changed how the blogging editor interprets my keyboard's "return" key. Now Blogger seems to insert a paragraph mark. Previously, it would would insert a line return. This fundamental change is very annoying and since I could not quickly find a way to get a simple line feed, I reverted back to using the legacy blogging interface.

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September 18, 2020

pain vortex

For about the past week, there has been a very annoying bug in the legacy "compose" editing window for blog posts. With Firefox, clicking in the "compose" window has given unpredictable results, often selecting some apparently random part of the page. As of this evening I no longer see the option to "Revert to the legacy Blogger." The "new Blogger" also has the bug that causes trouble selecting text.

 I was in the middle of making this blog post when I was forced to use the new blogging interface. I tried to search for a string of text in the new <HTML view> editing window, but the Firefox webpage search function did not work correctly. It may be that Google made "new Blogger" so that it only works with Chrome. I quickly ran into a second bug. Upon editing this blog post, the editor automatically opened in the HTML view and claimed that the HTML code is invalid. Here we go into bug land... 😢

The Firefox webpage search function finds two incidences of "bug", but it won't move down the HTML editing page to the second one, claiming that it has already reached the end of the page. In "compose" editing mode, the Firefox webpage search function finds seven incidences of "bug".

More Pain: November 2020