Monday 23 April 2012

Oh, Blogger

So remember when I said Blogger was introducing a new look and I wasn't sure I liked it?

Well, it turns out (as most technologically based things do) it was more complicated than just a change of font/layout.

How do I know this?

Well, because my posts stopped posting.

From what I've heard, I've been lucky.  Some people have lost posts and in some cases entire blogs.  I have a backup of my blog...not that I'd know what to do with it if I had to, but still.  And really, if my entire blog disappeared, I'd be more sad about the loss of an online diary record of my life than anything else.

But, yeah, my posts stopped posting.

I usually schedule posts to publish before 8 in the morning.  That way I figure people have time to read (but not of course on work time, ahem) and by the time I'm home for the evening I can answer any comments and see what people might have said.

And some days I get home and there are crickets, and usually I just figure the post didn't strike a chord with anyone enough for them to comment and no big deal.  But this week, I came home on Tuesday (I think) and thought... huh, I wonder why no one commented, I should go see what I had to say and why it was so boring.

And I went to my blog and my post wasn't there and I thought... hmmm, that's odd, I must have made a mistake, like put in PM instead of AM and so I went to manually publish the post and weirdly enough, it was all set to publish at 7:57 am and.... hadn't.

And it's tricky trying to report an issue to Blogger, but after a couple of days of this happening (not just a fluke then) I found "help forums" where other people were having the same issue and I felt better knowing I hadn't turned into some kind of ham fisted blogging idiot.

And then the new layout kicked in and suddenly everything didn't make sense.

I'm not a huge fan of change, and have, in fact, resisted changing to the upgraded template since they suggested it way back when, but this was a forced layout change to the "dashboard" and me no likey.

It's also very unfortunate that the new layout has seemingly brought with it the inability to schedule posts as the combo is, I predict, going to make a lot of people jump ship to a platform that will a) allow direct contact and support and b) not make massive errors that go unfixed and un-acknowleged for days.

This is a free service, I remind myself.  And it's worked pretty darn well for me for nearly seven years.  I'm not about to angrily storm off at this inconvenience, but it's annoying and I don't like things that mess with my flow/patterns/routines.  And Blogger's Google owned, is it not?  And aren't they a fairly massive company?  I would think they'd have some investment in a product working well and properly.

So I don't like blogger's new look.  (Or "user interface" I suppose is the fancy proper way to put it.)  And I'd really like them to fix the scheduled post issue ASAP.

For now, I'm going to have to try to remember to log on and manually publish in the mornings while I'm eating my breakfast.  So if there's no posts there some days this week, you can know that my brain wasn't awake enough to remember.

Ugh and argh and harumph and sigh.


Edited to add:  I remembered to self publish this this morning.  Signed in and hit publish while eating my breakfast.  And just got home to find?  Still didn't work.  ARGH!

8 comments:

Eric said...

Don't worry, we'll still be here reading your blog no matter what time you hit the "Publish" button!

Victoria said...

Awwwww! :) Thanks!

Powell River Books said...

I'm with you. I got caught up in the post scheduling fiasco too. I tried the new interface for two days, but it is much harder to use. The hardest thing is photo placement and spacing. I had to go into html and make manual adjustments that I never had to do in the old version. I found a way back to the old interface so I'm staying there until I get kicked off. - Margy

Victoria said...

Yeah, it's pretty ugh all round. Strongly dislike the new interface and am surprised they force introduced something that seems to be so widely disliked and is turning up so many issues! I've had to start going into html for some things too... which is pretty disappointing after so many years of ease. Crazy.

Jade Pham said...

Thanks for posting about the scheduling issue! I thought I was doing something wrong in the new blogger interface. Wish it wasn't happening at all, but glad I'm not the only one with this problem.

Victoria said...

I know, that's what I first thought too, is this me? But.... no. Third week of this brokenness... Hopefully they'll sort it out soon.

Jonathan said...

Is this where I whisper "Wordpress" into your brain ?

Victoria said...

Man oh man, what is that weird ringing in my ears???? ;)