21 April 2012

Google revamps Blogger -- is it worth it?

The last time Google revamped Blogger, it was dysfunctional for 6 months or more, and thousands of Blogger users packed it in and moved to Wordpress.I myself started a WordPress blog, and got ready to move completely if Blogger got any worse, but I kept this one open, and eventually Blogger was more or less fixed, and most of the stuff that was broken started working again. But my WordPress blog quickly passed this one in the number of readers, and still gets about twice as many readers a day as this one. 

Now they're at it again. According to their hype, "Introducing the completely new, streamlined blogging experience that makes it easier for you to find what you need and focus on writing great blog posts."

Does it live up to the hype?

Not really.

It actually makes it harder to find what you need. Perhaps some of that is unfamiliarity, and we'll get used to it, but the main change is that they've put everything into a smaller type in order to make it harder to read, and they've hidden a lot of functions behind cryptic symbols so you have to hover your cursor all over the screen to find what you're looking for. There used to be a clear and unambiguous label "Edit Posts" and you would get a list of recent posts and drafts that you could edit. Now they've hidden it away behind a cryptic symbol, but I can't remember what it is. In the past (and still on blog posts) they've used a pencil icon for "Edit Post", but now they sometimes use it for creating a new post, so it gets very confusing.

On improvement has been the linking. You can now, when you add a link, choose if you want it to open in a new tab or page by ticking a box, instead of editing it afterwards and typing in 'target="_blank"'. That's a definite improvement.

Another improvement has been in simplifyingt their HTML code. Now if you click on the i for italics it uses the code '...', which is better than the nonsense that the older editor produced, but is still not as good as WordPress's use of the standard HTML '...'.

It seems to put pictures where you want them in posts, rather than putting them at the top and leaving it up to you to move them down if you didn't want it at the top. But its picture placement is still not as easy to use as the one in WordPress. Where it scores over WordPress is in the same ways as it did before -- the use of Javascript widgets, for example.

And then there's some weird stuff:.

On the new Blogger dashboard they say:
Connect Blogger to Google+ and get a suite of new features that will help you build and engage your audience. Learn more.
Well, I clicked on the "learn more", and learnt nothing, zilch, nada.

All it does is that it gives you some hype about Google+. It tells you nothing about what happens when you connect your blog to Google+, which is what I wanted to "learn more" about. It also doesn't tell you if you can disconnect it if you don't like what happens.


And this seems to lead into and link up to this: Can We Still Trust Google? – Danny Brown

3 comments:

jams o donnell said...

Don't like the feel of the new layout.. oh and scheduling doesn't seem to work

James Higham said...

It actually makes it harder to find what you need. Perhaps some of that is unfamiliarity, and we'll get used to it, but the main change is that they've put everything into a smaller type in order to make it harder to read, and they've hidden a lot of functions behind cryptic symbols so you have to hover your cursor all over the screen to find what you're looking for.

Precisely. Ditto with gmail. Functions which once existed no longer do but it's not just Blogger/Google, sad to say. It's also WordPress. I'm using one two versions ago, which worked fine. I tried the newer variants and they lack functionality, even something as simple as "View Blog".

Steve Hayes said...

There's a way round it in Gmail - click on the "Use basic HTML view"

And then at the top it says "Set basic HTML as default view", and then you can see what is going on.

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