We Interrupt...

Figure 1. The "legacy" text format is no
longer the default functionality.

During the past 4 months I have been avoiding "the new Blogger". In June, I briefly used "the new Blogger" then continued using the old legacy interface until I was forced to switch in September.

 

Return

One of the first annoyances that I discovered while using "the new Blogger" was that the default behavior of my "return" key had been changed. Among the text format options the default is now "Paragraph", but I am able to return to the "Normal" (legacy) linefeed.

White Space

One of the "features" of "the new Blogger" that I complained about in June was all of the white space on my screen. For example, rather than show multiple labels for blog posts, only one was displayed, even when there was a huge white space running across the page where more labels could have been displayed. Since June, this had been changed. However, "the new Blogger" each label must now be shown as a KLUNKY button rather than as a non-intrusive link:

 

Fig. 2. Wasted screen space around the CHUNKY images and label buttons, but now there are more labels.

What is most annoying is how "the new Blogger" wastes my precious screen space while I am editing blog posts. I have a nice large display, but rather than allow me to use all that screen space for creating my next blog post, much of the screen space is wasted:

Fig. 3. While editing a blog post, only about 37% of the screen space is available for the edited blog post.

Preset Image Sizes

Figure 4. Presets.

Back in June, I could not see a way to get "the new Blogger" to insert images at their original size. The new interface for inserting and formatting images is still annoying, but now there is a pop-out menu that includes the old "legacy" image size presets including "original" size. The default image size is still "medium".

 

Re-positioning images on the page is not easy. Theoretically you can drag an image to where you want it, but the software often messes things up and sometimes it refuses to put an image where you want it to be on the page. I use many images, so I checked if positioning images works better in Chrome (see the discussion below).

Figure 5. It was impossible to position the image where I wanted it on the page. At first, it was too high on the page (see above). Then it was too low on the page (see below).

Figure 6. With Firefox, I could not position the image correctly. Using Chrome, I could move it up one line (see below).

Deleting Images

Blogger removed the space between
the words 'new' and ' Blogger'.

There is no obvious way to quickly and gracefully delete an image from a blog post. The default  text format for image captions is center alignment. When I deleted an image and its caption, the center alignment was transferred over to the adjacent main text. When I corrected the alignment of that text, I found that  Blogger software had removed a space from between two words in my blog post. 

Preview

in Preview (bolded caption)

in edit window (no bold)

Unlike the situation in June, the default for Preview is now to open the preview of a blog post inside a new browser tab. Apparently there is a bug that can insert formatting from the main text into an adjacent caption. As shown to the left, caption text picked up bold formatting from the adjacent main text.

inexplicable line space (?)

The default for "the new Blogger" seems to be leaving no space between the main text and an image, which I think is crazy. Back in June, dealing with images in "the new Blogger" was even more pathological than it is now, with captions breaking away from images. Firefox seems to have fixed that issue. The new Preview gives results that are not seen in the editing window, a shown above for the bolding of text in captions. 

 

I was able to partially fix the image positioning problem that is shown above (see Figure 6) using Chrome browser (I could move the image up one line, but not two). However, in Chrome there is still the bug that rips captions off of images. Like Firefox, Chrome's webpage search function also does not work with "the new Blogger" HTML edit page. Ug!

Conclusion: some of the bugs in "the new Blogger" that were present 3 months ago have been fixed. Some bugs still remain. 😞

Next: the origins of Mary

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insert link tool

UPDATE 9/20/2020

There are still problems with the "new" Blogger handles images. I like to make numerous hypertext links in my blog posts, so one of the most annoying "features" of "the new Blogger" is the tool for inserting links. In the legacy version of the software, you could insert a link with command + k and then paste the link URL with command + v then hit the return key and you were done, no mouse clicks required. Now I must first click in the "Paste" field (I have no idea why it is called "Paste or search") then do the URL paste then click the "Open link in new window" option (I almost always use this) and then click a third time on "APPLY". In the legacy Blogger, it could remember your preference for making links open in the same window or not, but that functionality was lost in "the new Blogger".

UPDATE 9/22/2020

image source

Here is an example of the kind of thing that can go wrong with images when using "the new Blogger". See the small rectangle that is visible near the center of the image to the right. When I moved the image (click-and-drag, which worked well in the legacy version of Blogger), the image caption was detached from the image. I deleted the text from that "floating" caption, but the code for a table remained, as shown below:

code for an empty "ghost" table

Code for a normal figure shown below:

some image caption bugs have been fixed

October 1st update 

An annoying feature of "the new Blogger" is that you can compose a new blog post using the "compose view" only to have the  Blogger interface suddenly shift you into the "HTML view" and tell you that your blog post's HTML markup code has an error.

The good news is that some of the major bugs described above on this page seem to have been fixed or partially fixed during September.

Most annoying is that if I insert code such as that shown below for making an internal link between two parts of a blog post, then Blogger edits that code out of my blog post.

HTML code from this blog post.

November 20th Update

feedback

Jimmy the intern had a bad week at Blogger. Some days during the past week, Blogger has been nearly unusable. Long ago it used to be easy to loose text while creating a new blog post with Blogger. Then the programmers at Blogger finally figured out how to insert an auto-save feature into the software. For many years that worked fine. During this past week, they changed that auto-save feature so that the Blogger user interface would spend most of the time in some prolonged save process, continually interrupting my ability to keep working on a new blog post. Why any software company would subject its users to such horrible bugs is mystifying.

Related Reading: more fun with Blogger in 2021