Showing posts with label what blogger's enhancements missed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label what blogger's enhancements missed. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Oh, Good ~ Blogger Has Changed




I last created a post yesterday and ta-da! I find today that the Blogger interface has changed. I'm not saying everything should remain static forever, but I've been blogging since 2007 and I knew my way around.

I'm sure the tech guys worked hard on these changes, so kudos, I guess. And I'll get used to them. The reason I use Blogger and not WordPress is ease of use. WordPress is a quagmire...and ugly. I have a blog there that I created after Google ate my blog and sent me on a dizzying tangle of links that never once solved my issue. I created one post on WordPress and then bit the bullet; created a completely new Blogger account and lost all my previous followers, alas. On the plus side, I'm now followed by approximately 73 bots. (Bots don't leave comments, by the way.)

From what I've ascertained so far, the updates are largely cosmetic; simply more confusing to find. And the addition of emojis is rather superfluous. What am I, five? 🙄(had to do it once)

I browsed Blogger's delineation of the changes and found statements like this:

A fresh Comments page helps you connect with readers more easily by surfacing areas that need your attention, like comment moderation. 

I was an educator in my previous life ~ don't talk like this! I'm guessing the writer consulted a thesaurus. I do it, too; but make sure the synonym makes sense in context.

The new change that rankles me is the inability to embed a video the old-fashioned way. Now I have to rely on a search within Blogger and hope that the video I want is listed as an option. Bad, Google! Major faux pas.**

**UPDATE: I found by opening the video search box and pasting in the address of the video, voila! (duh; sorry, Google.)

An enhancement I've longed for but still doesn't seem to exist, is a means to find other blogs in my areas of interest. If no one can find a blog, what is the reason for its existence? (I actually know someone who printed up business cards with his blog address ~ c'mon!) I obviously don't blog for followers, since I have no "real" ones, so I've given up on anyone finding me; but I would still like to read other music (or other) blogs. This is one area in which WordPress excels.

What's missing from Blogger is the human connection. Maybe the developers know this. Maybe they intuit that most of us are composing with the quixotic notion that somebody, somewhere will read it. Maybe blogging is dumb and antiquated. If it is, so be it. Rich Farmers has turned into my personal diary anyway; a means of preserving memories and milestones and musings.

To be fair to Google, the changes aren't really confusing. They're actually straightforward; just different.

But since this is a music blog, after all, I must go with a "confusing" song: