james_nicoll

Misery is a dish best served in good company

There have been changes in Blogger? Wow, I had no idea.

Other than Google's official blogs looking like rotting roadkill, what's new on Blogger?

Judging by last night and the exgf, protracted cursing on the part of people trying to make posts on Blogger.

They force you to take Chrome in order to put up new posts.

Like everybody else I hate it.

I'd like to move to another service, but they are all highly problematic, and even if you go domain, your spam problems are humongous it seems.

Love, C.

I haven't actually hit "Publish", but the new post editor is working in Firefox 11 for me.

That makes sense since google etc is blocking IE everywhere it can.

Love, C.

The problem I'm having with Blogger is that they have broken almost everything in an effort to make everything on Google look like Google+. I don't know that they are officially telling people to switch to Chrome, but every single question I've posted to the help forum (populated entirely by volunteers, mind) about the broken parts of Blogger has resulted in me being told to switch to Chrome. So while Firefox is working okay for you now, I would suspect it will eventually break, and this will be exactly what Google/Blogger wants.

I must be leading a charmed life then, because I'm not having any trouble posting, and I use IE.

The scheduling feature is currently broken, for at least a large subset of users. That happened to me about a week ago, though it's not clear if the problem is general.

And the new layout for posting is Google-stark in their typical white-space way, which is both annoying and difficult to get used to.

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows - William Shakespeare

I just watched Tempest!

Synchronicity. DVD or stage? If DVD, which one? Was it teh Taymor version, and if so, what did you think of it?

(Sorry, huge Shakespeare buff who loves The Tempest to distraction).

The Helen Mirren one.

There's supposed to be a way to opt out of the new format, but I don't know how.

If I wasn't so intimidated by the concept of migrating the whole thing over to Wordpress, I would.

This is what someone posted on a blog I go to about getting the old Dashboard, at least temporarily:

Look in the top right hand corner of your dashboard, under your profile photo.

See the widget symbol to the right of the box that says “English”? Hover your mouse over the widget and you’ll see that it says “Blogger options.”

Click the widget and scroll down to “Old Blogger Interface.” Click on it and you’ll be returned to your old Dashboard.

I'm migrating to Wordpress, and the easy part is just pointing my URL away from Blogger and toward WP. I will leave my old posts on Blogger as an archive, though I have used the Import function on WP and it works well and is very easy. Photo formatting might change on the imported posts, but it catches them all and is really just the click of a button.

The difficult part has been customizing my blog (using Wordpress.ORG templates), but I am notoriously bad at coding and I suspect most people would have less difficulty than me.

Yes, I have a friend who works as a question-answerer for Blogger, and she got me straightened out temporarily. But the operative word is temporarily. When I did get it switched back, a little thing popped up saying that the old interface will be gone in a month.

The thing is, I'm still on XP (and will be for a while yet), so I can't upgrade to the version of IE that Blogger supports. And I'll be damned if I'm going to switch web browsers just because they say I have to. At this stage it's the principle of the thing.

So either my blog goes away in less than a month (because the new interface literally is not usable on my version of IE) or I find someone (who???) to hold my hand during the switch to Wordpress, taking time I have better uses for. Neither one is a viable option to me right now.

Could you just start a new blog at Wordpress with a link to the Blogger one as an archive? I'm just throwing out a suggestion, not trying to be pushy.

I'm the same way about browsers. I have Firefox because it works the best with my transcription software and there is no way I'm changing just so Blogger will work.

Wish your friend would sometimes get my questions! I always get two men, one who is unbearably rude, the other who is nice but extremely difficult to get hold of.

"there is no way I'm changing just so Blogger will work."

I'm that way with all websites. If someone doesn't want me to read, there's no way I'm going to be so rude as to sneak around the barrier he's put up.

But then I feel head-patted by the exclamation point in "You have successfully logged out!", and click on "about:blank" an instant after logging out of LJ so I won't get indignant. I'm probably too touchy.

I could. Maybe when I get over my mad, I will. The way I feel about it right now, though, that may take a while. And who's to say Wordpress won't pull something similar down the road?

I'm pretty sure my friend saw my name and/or email address and grabbed my complaint [g].

I should say that while it may be the click of a button, it has been my experience in such things that the click of that sort of button will open whole new avenues of goofed-up-ness that are usually unique to me. That's just the way this sort of thing works for me.

WP is a good setup and if you have it on your own domain, I find Akismet to be fairly effective at blocking spam.

That last clause is very nice Swahili, so far as I'm concerned [wry g].

I don't have (or want, actually) to put a blog on my own domain. I wouldn't have the first clue how to do it (or want to learn, frankly).

Sorry. It's the frustrated mad talking. I just don't want to deal with this, nor do I see myself wanting to deal with this anytime soon. Or distant.

If you can navigate your way to the dashboard (no mean feat given the almost total lack of usable links in the new format) you should see a navigation list or action list on the right hand side of the page, about half way down (ish!) On that list is a link to revert to the old interface.

I did that this morning but blogger still won't display in-post pictures properly (text wrapping seems to be broken) and they say the old interface will be switched off soon.

After that we're stuck with the stupid new one.

Fiona

Yeah, I managed that, but it was a trick, since the new format on my browser hides the little cog symbol thingy.

And, yeah, I've got to get mine migrated off Blogger in the next week or so, because if it doesn't work with my browser, I am not willing to be dictated to as to what browser Blogger thinks I should use.

On the commenter side, for a while they'd remove the option to get comments on a most e-mailed to you. They seem to have put it back, though.