Blogger Adventure 2021

the "undo" button in the Blogger interface

Back in December I began writing a new story called "The Alastor Network". All during January 2021 I've been composing new chapters of that story and posting each chapter to its own blog page. "The Alastor Network" has grown to be more than 40,000 words and I've been having lots of fun with it. Yesterday I was done writing chapter 9 and getting ready to publish it in a new blog post at the start of February. 

 

You've to rewrite it

you are screwed... have a nice day

Today the content of that new blog page was erased. Normally in Blogger, if something bad happens while editing a post, you can use the undo button, but the undo button did nothing for me today. My 5,000 word blog post was gone. 

 

lost Blogger content

At the Blogger "community" forum I quickly found discussion forum posts from other bloggers (such as John Silva) who had suffered the same problem and were told: you are screwed; there is no way to recover a lost blog post.

 

the Blogger user experience

The New Blogger

For most of the past year I have been annoyed by "the new Blogger". I last blogged about the bugs in "the new blogger last November. During November 2020 there was a change to the Blogger auto-save feature which sometimes makes the Blogger interface nearly unusable. The problem is particularly bad for longer blog posts. The Blogger software usually gets itself confused once a blog post has a few images and a few thousand words. Sometimes Blogger becomes so slow at saving the current draft of the blog post that it is impossible to continue working. At these times, it can help to take a break, restart my browser and then continue constructing the blog post.

"published on" is set to the moment of the first edit

In the case of my magical disappearing blog post of today, I may have been walking on thin ice. Several weeks ago, I began making a blog post called "Brevik" which was going to describe the arrival of Acyreff on the planet Brevik and her investigation of the hierion field generator technology used for the Shadow Drone project. However, a strange thing happened on the way to Brevik. I repeatedly discovered additional parts of "The Alastor Network" that I wanted to write about before the Appenine could reach Brevik. Thus, several versions of the "Brevik" blog post were created and then eventually re-named.

cost-benefit analysis of Blogger

Time travel blogging

There is currently a bug in how "the new blogger" assigns dates to new blog posts. In the "old blogger", you could choose to set a time to publish a new blog post. The default setting was "automatic", which meant that when you used the "publish" button then the date and time of publication for that blog post became the day and time when you pushed the "publish" button. Now, in the "new Blogger", the default is that Blogger records the first time you begin to make a new blog post and that becomes the day and time of publication unless you over-ride it. 

day planner for Jimmy the intern

Sometimes I un-publish a blog post, change the date of publication and then re-publish the blog post so that I can change the order of two blog posts. Thus, with my long, complex blog posts, combined with renaming and re-dating of blog posts I may have gotten Blogger confused. I have the feeling that Jimmy the intern who is currently "developing" the Blogger software never really uses the software. When someone complains about bugs, he probably makes a 5 word test blog post, has no trouble and is done with his duties for the day.

 

We interrupt your blogging....

Dealing with the pain of blogging.
Original cover art by John Pederson
and see this

Two days ago, I tried to do a preview of my "Brevik" blog post and rather than get the requested preview page from Blogger's server, I got the "notice" shown in the image above (Web Creators). I've never previously seen one of Google's "notices' inserted into a Blogger preview web page in this way. I have to wonder if Google's absurd "notice" actually damaged my blog file.

I had to dismiss that intrusive "notice" (which had nothing to do with Blogger) before I could preview my blog post. This blog is centered on science fiction, so allow me to mention the story "The Feeling of Power" in which people in a future society, dependent on computers, have forgotten how to do arithmetic. I suspect we are already at the point where many smart phone users can't read a book. I would not be surprised if Google pulls the plug on Blogger. Who wants to read when you can just watch YouTube videos all day?

Next: Evolution of Telepathy

published Feb 1

TimeandDate.comical

Here is another manifestation of the Blogger bug for determining the dates when blog posts are published. As shown in the image to the left, I published three blog posts on February 1st, including this post ("Blogger Adventure 2021").

Jan, Feb, what's the diff?

As shown to the right, Blogger dutifully put January 31st dates on all three of these blog posts. I don't really expect Jimmy the intern at Blogger to fix this bug. I suspect that Google is $pending all of its effort$ and mucho money hiring lawyers. 💰

March Madness

During the past year while most of the world has been dealing with the covid pandemic, I've been fighting the horrors of "the new Blogger". I just had a repeat of what I first experienced in January: the Blogger software deleted another one of my blog posts. You might think that after a year Google would have fixed the bugs in their new version of Blogger, but no. Blogger has a bug in how it deals with pasted text. While you type and create a blog post in "compose" mode, the software converts text and images into HTML code. However, due to a bug, pasted text is not handled gracefully. See my March blog post called "Blogger Paste Bug".