TTPMO: Blogger

Today, I'm trying out a new feature on the blog. It's called TTPMO --- Things That Piss Me Off. Just in case there wasn't enough negativity out there on the internets already, I'm going to do my best to add my own gripes to the interconnected network of vitriol known as the World Wide Web.

My first target, fittingly enough, is Blogger, the interface I'm currently using to post this blog. Although this fits into the general TTPMO category of "things that don't work the way they're supposed to," I would like to sum up the current situation like this: Blogger, you suck.

All I want to do is write a blog that expresses some of my thoughts, catalogues some of my photos, and looks spiffy. And, as far as I can tell, this is what you want me to be doing too. So why the hell are you making it so hard? Especially the "looks spiffy" part. Your default font is Times, which is legible but insanely boring and makes it look like I'm writing some kind of corporate memo. You seem to have an option whereby I can change the default font to something a little more classy, for which purpose I picked Georgia. Now, I was under the impression that changing the default meant that every new blog post that I write would conform to the new specifications. This does not appear to be the case. Instead, I have to go in to every new post and manually change the font. Are you hearing this? Manually! Despite the fact that I've already told you I want to type in Georgia all the time, you're making me tell you, all the time, that I want to type in Georgia. What gives?

And then, even after I've changed it manually by mucking about with the HTML, you insist on f'ing up my coding every time I make any edits to a post, dropping bits of ugly and unnecessary tags all over the place. Example: It is not necessary to change the font for every damned paragraph of every damned post. I've already changed it once for the whole thing, so please stop cluttering up my code with this crap.

Oh, and the new photo uploading interface? Improved in some ways, true, but horrifying in others. Why are you making me upload my photos at full size and then change their display characteristics (say it with me) manually? Again, I used to have a nice default setting that made all of a pictures fit within the text, not just its upper-left-hand corner, and again, you seem to be taking some some passive-aggressive pleasure in ignoring it.

To be fair, you are posting my blog when I tell you to and the rest of the page generally looks fine. But I'm angry about this mess with the editor. I'm also angry that you decided to institute all of these changes during the one month a year when I really need to be posting every day and hence don't have time to be spoon-feeding you HTML tags. And I'm really, really angry that I wrote three-quarters of my post about The Wall only find that you irretrievably deleted the entire thing when I tried to add a link to a picture. I then had to re-write it, and it wasn't as good, and I nearly threw my mouse through my monitor until I remembered that it wasn't its fault --- it was yours.

In conclusion: Blogger, you piss me off.

But, despite all that, I do want to salvage this relationship. So I'm going to search out some mediation: an offline blog editor. I can talk to it, tell it what I want, communicate my needs, and then it can talk to you in a language that you understand (which isn't English, certainly, but I'm starting to suspect it isn't even HTML). I'm still searching around for a good program, and I'll let you know when I find one. Your input on this decision is welcome, and let's see if we can't move forward in some kind of positive way.