Thursday, 3 September 2020

Unbroken Blogger is Finally Fixed!

I've been a Blogger user since 2006. My first HPANWO site was the main one and it expanded quickly from there, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com. The user interface for Blogger has been fairly unchanged for all that time and it's something I've got so used to that these days I create posts almost instinctively. I have made thousands over the last fourteen years. The interface has changed slightly during that time with mostly minor decorative updates every couple of years that have not seriously affected its function. Now, for the first time since I launched HPANWO, Blogger, in its divine wisdom, has decided to transform the entire creator page totally! Everything has been shifted round for reasons that escape me. I mean, tell me; what advantage is there in moving the "view blog" button from the top to the bottom of the left hand column? Does it save energy because you don't have to move the mouse so far from the toolbar? Does that somehow reduce the carbon footprint of your bloody desktop!? Anyway, I tried to create a post with the new system and it came out all wrong. My house style is for single line spaces between paragraphs without any indent, with double line spaces between blocks; but the new creator automatically generates double line spaces on every occasion you select a new line. This means my posts from now on are going to look totally different unless I find a solution. (See what this one looks like. At the time of writing this only affects the HPANWO TV blog.) It's possible the only option will be for me to learn HTML and convert every draft into that before posting it. Blogger have gone to a huge amount of energy and expense to redesign their entire creator interface when the existing one was perfectly adequate and all their users were accustomed to it. I really wish people would put this much effort into fixing things that are broken.

2 comments:

Laurence said...

Line 206 of the HTML code for this article gives the line height, currently set at 1.4:

line-height: 1.4;

Alternatively, have you considered any of the follwoing?: Templates

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

Thanks, Laurence. I'll get on top of it one way or another. In fact my last HPANWO TV post looks alright. Maybe it was just a bug.