Churn for Churn's Sake

Google's Blogger (Blogspot) editor has suddenly become 'new'.

(Okay, not really 'suddenly'. And 'Help' is no help, whether the 'user community' or the official help line.)

So I'm trying out the 'new'. But all the worst old bugs are still there, and they've added some new bad bugs, as well. 

One thing that drives me nuts is that I can't discard an edit. Even if the bugs have destroyed my work, the destructive results are automagically saved over what I had before. This is a bug in the design -- a design flaw. A failed design.

I haven't yet figured out how to leave off editing without publishing, except for hitting the browser's back button or just closing the browser window. To me, that feels too much like shutting the computer down by pulling the power cord.

The Enter key now means paragraph break instead of line break. To get a line break, you have to use shift-Enter. That's arbitrarily changing the meaning of the Enter key -- and why? Turn 40 years of tradition upside down, just because some college intern has been indoctrinated in the ideals and idolatries of that perversion of markup languages, XML? (Once upon a time, I thought XML was a good thing.)

Arbitrary changes are another of those practices direct from the worst practices handbook.

Too many things have changed without explanation, too much expects the user to understand the new metaphor (like the hamburger mark meaning something specific), too much expects the connection to be constant, undelayed, and following the latest changes to the Internet Specifications. (If your Internet connection coughs, be patient. It'll either bomb out on you or recover, eventually.)

Importing images into a blog that was started with the legacy editor will do stupid things. The image won't drop where the cursor is, it will drop at the next paragraph break, which is probably at the end of the document. Here's how I fixed that with the chapter of the novel that I'm currently working on:

1. The pencil at the top left -- click the tiny triangle to its right and select HTML view.
2. Click in the edit window, then right click and select all.
3. Copy the HTML and paste it into an open, empty Gedit window. Any plain text editor that can match and replace on end-of-line/newline will do.
4. Type a paragraph start

   <p>

   at the beginning of the document and a paragraph end

   </p>

   at the end.
   
5. Replace all line break pairs with paragraph breaks split by newline. In Gedit, that's
   1. ctrl-H,
   2. check the "enable regular expressions" button,
   3. and replace

      <br /><br />

      with

      </p>\n<p>

6. Check that the results are sane before selecting all and copying to a new blogger document. Keep the old document in case it doesn't work well.
7. Now you can insert an image at any paragraph break.
   

The new editor was was supposed to have table editing, but that appears to have disappeared. As it usually does. HTML tables are too ambiguous for a general editor. Can't college students be given a preview on the implications of NP-completeness in their freshman year?

And it looks like Google has decided pop-up windows are no longer a vulnerable feature in web browsers or something, because the 'new' way to do previews, and, apparently, interact with the user about what to do with an open document, has Firefox asking me if I want to change pop-up settings. I have to give blogspot/blogger permission to impersonate Firefox to interact with the editor.

I'm not going to do that. That's yet another from the worst practices handbook.

Reporting bugs? How do you take a screen shot of yourself hitting the Enter key? How do you get the pop-up blocker in the screen-shot when the screen-shot is limited to the active window? And how do you get feedback, to be sure that anyone has even looked at your bug report, much less understood it?

And let's not forget that intermittent Internet access just makes all the bugs more prominent.

And Blogger/Blogspot/Google is now going to force everyone using Blogspot to use the new editor. You can still revert to the 'legacy' editor, but it is no longer functional. And the next time you log on, it has you back in the 'new' editor. And you get the message saying "You will be moved. Resistance is futile."

Why does new have to mean more bugs?

Why is new necessary if it doesn't fix anything?

You may wonder why I use Blogspot if I have so many complaints about it. 

It was convenient. That's the only reason. 

 It was convenient. No longer. Apparently, I will now be migrating my blogs away from Blogspot. I've migrated before, I will do so again. 

And I suppose that means my gmail account will be terminated within a few years.

Why does a company as rich as Google feel it necessary to force us to accept churn for churn's sake?