The image at the top is there because this was going to be a post about the new fishing event in Neverness to Everness. That's not happening any more (Tomorrow, probably.) but the picture still has some relevance qua "picture", so I'm going to leave it in. It's a lot prettier to look at than the rest of the pictures in this post, that's for sure.
Now it's not about fishing, this is a post about blogging. More specifically, it's a post about Blogger, in which I moan about it.
Whining about blogging? Really? Do you have to? Can't we have fishing?
No, you can't. My blog, my prerogative. It's Blaugust and if you can't moan about blogging in a blogging festival, when can you moan about blogging? Also, is anyone else starting find the words "blog" and "blogging" sound weird ? And there's nearly a month of this left to go...
Before I get into the moaning proper, I will just say it's possible some of what I'm going to complain about could be caused by my PC rather than Blogger itself. It's not like I haven't had other issues there. My money's on Blogger, though.
Yesterday, when I was talking about "my very first blog", which of course is this one, I mentioned that, back in 2010, I'd considered both WordPress and Blogger for the honor of hosting my nascent blog. That suggests I'd done some research on both of them so I could make an informed choice. It might suggest it but it's not what happened.
About all I can remember is that I signed up for both then looked at the UI and the controls and decided Blogger looked easier to understand than WordPress. I can't honestly remember but I very much doubt I did more than take a glance and maybe try to make a page. Might not even have done that much.
I very definitely had no clue how popular either of the platforms would have been at the time or which blogs I was following used which. I also wouldn't have had the least idea how well-maintained or frequently updated they were. So it was pure luck that I picked the one that never changes.
That's the Gold Standard for software, for me. If I could, I'd lock every app at the point where I decide I'm satisfied with it, which would usually be five minutes after I've chosen to use it at all. If I'm not satisfied by then I'll already have uninstalled it.
I won't say developers never make changes I appreciate but I will say that it's a racing certainty I won't need or want the huge majority of their "upgrades" or "improvements", almost all of which I'm virtually certain only exist either because someone's job depends on them demonstrating their worth to the company by "innovating"or else on the company's desire to find yet more ways of squeezing money out of the customers.
Blogger is owned and operated by Google, the megacorp that shuttered its much-loved RSS service, Google Reader in 2013, citing declining use. Google Reader's primary function was to get blogs into the hands of readers, so logic would suggest Google's blogging platform, Blogger, ought to have been next to go. If the readership was declining, surely the authorship must have been dropping away too.
And yet, more than a dozen years later, here we all still are, some of us writing, a lot more of us reading Blogger blogs. (That word's not getting any less weird the more I use it, is it?) Did Google decide they'd made a mistake, canning Google Reader? There was business there still, for sure. Plenty of new RSS readers moved into the space Google had vacated. Perhaps they saw that happening and thought they'd leave Blogger alone for a bit, just to stop anyone getting ideas.
These things do happen. There's a furniture salesroom around the corner from where I live that's been there for a decade. It never has any customers and I mean never. I have literally never seen anyone go in or come out.
Before it was a furniture store, the building used to be a supermarket. The new business puzzled me for a long time until someone, who keeps an ear to the ground where these kinds of things are concerned, told me that when the small supermarket moved out, one of the big supermarket companies bought the lease, although they were aware that, due to longstanding issues of local politics in the city, they wouldn't able to open their own branch there. What they wanted to do was to stop any of their main rivals getting in there instead.
Since then, nothing's changed in local politics, so it's still an imaginary furniture shop. I imagine the cost of running it empty (Well, it does have furniture, to be fair. Just no-one to buy any of it.) isn't even a rounding error for the huge supermarket company behind it, just like Blogger won't even be a dot of dust on the screen when someone at Google is looking at a spreadsheet for those rounding errors. Blogger most likely still exists because Google is so unfeasibly huge, no-one who matters remembers it exists.
Not that I think anything so calculated is going on with Blogger. Benign neglect is the story there, or so I've always believed. And it suits me very well. I get a frisson of schadenfreude every time I read someone complaining about the latest thing an update to WordPress has broken.
I got used to Blogger in a matter of weeks, did all the fiddling with it I ever planned on doing and now it'd be my preference if it stayed the way it was then until the heat death of the universe. So I'm not best pleased to see very worrying signs that someone at Google is starting to tinker with it.
For as long as I can remember the Insert Image function has been nothing much more than a drop down menu leading to a blank window with a blue Browse button in the middle that lets you select a file from your PC or from various other sources. And that's still all it is, except one day last week or the week before, the blank window got a makeover.
Now it has a dotted line all round it and gentle curves at the corners. And there's a big, green cloud in the middle to let you know you're about to upload your image to the cloud.
Fine. If you must. And it was fine. Until it wasn't.
I've been using Blogger's Insert Image function ever since I started this blog. It's always worked flawlessly. I've developed the habit of editing my images in Paint.net, saving them in a file cleverly named "Blog", then uploading them to Blogger via the Insert Image window before positioning and resizing them on the page, using the tools provided by Blogger for the purpose.
For a while, after what seemed to be purely a visual update, nothing changed. And then, a couple of days ago, the whole thing stopped working. Now, when I try to upload a picture, I invariably get the message "Transfer encountered too many consecutive failures".
A Google search offers a number of possible fixes for the problem. I tried a couple and they didn't work. I might have gone on to try the more invasive options but luckily I remembered that you don't actually need to use Insert Image at all. I just liked it because it was neat and tidy.
You can simply cut and paste images straight into the draft. All the images in the posts for the last few days were added that way. They appear there huge, bloated and falling off the page but the same tools I always used to resize images soon fix that. Once they're there, you can mostly drag them around the same as always, although they're a bit more pernickety to handle.
Overall, though, it's actually faster and easier than the old way. And it means I'm not duplicating images in storage the way I always have (Because of course I never cleared the dupes out or deleted anything.) In an odd way, I'm kind of happy with how it's turned out but it is undeniably a more primitive method and I'm only using it at all because Google broke the more sophisticated one. (Unless, as I say, it's my PC playing up...)
The first signs of this renewed interest in Blogger came a few weeks ago, when a new button appeared in the line of controls along the top. It's hard to miss. It's the only one that's not in black&white. On a mouseover it identifies as "Insert widget or AI powered enhancements" and until this moment I have never pressed it to see what it does.
I'm going to do that now. Hold on to your seats! Aha! It pops up another button that says "Insert Google Search Widget". I am not pressing that!
Instead, I googled it, in part because having google interrogate google to tell me what it's up to always amuses me. According to this very helpful link the button ought to give me a two-option drop-down menu, with the option I'm seeing plus another that would allow me to "auto add links to search."
Apparently both of these options "create links to Google Search pages". The first, the one I have, adds a colored icon to your links, along with a relevant picture. Apparently it doesn't work very well yet, which is fine with me because I'm not going to be using it unless it's for humorous effect.
It does, at least, only put those pictures where you tell it to put them. The other new feature, the one that has an icon that looks like a magic wand, uses AI to go through your post and figure out for itself what might be worth linking. Then it goes to google search, finds a link and adds it to your post, all without bothering to ask you if you approve.
Like hell it does! Look, I'm somewhere towards the positive end of the AI spectrum, by the standards of this community at least, in that I can see uses for it and I think of it as merely a tool to be used not a threat to be stamped out but I'm sure as hell not going to abrogate responsibility for placing links to external sites on my blog and hand it over to some algorithm with delusions of adequacy!
Then again, I don't even have the magic wand in the menu, so it's a notional issue for the moment. I remember now, I did see it wafting around at the bottom of the screen for a while, which apparently is what it used to do before they added the button at the top, but it's gone altogether now. And good riddance!
Finally, when I was writing yesterday's post, I kept getting the feeling Blogger was trying to make me type in blocks, the way WordPress does. I kept having to move the cursor back up a line after every paragraph. It's stopped today, so maybe I was imagining it.
I'm very familiar with the Block method from the comment sections of WP blogs, which also use it. I quite like it. Well, I certainly don't hate it. It sort of fits the way I put a post together so I'm not opposed to something like that being added to Blogger... as an option.
My feeling is that all changes of this sort should be optional. I'm sure some people have been crying out for little colored icons next to their links and I'm happy for them to get what they asked for. Just so long as I don't have to have them too.
I fear, though, that now someone at Google has noticed they own a blogging platform this will just be the start of it. At what point the whole thing will become so annoying I'll have to start thinking about other options is impossible to say but I'm sure that time will come. For now, though, I'm going to carry on as before, with work-arounds as necessary.
And I'm not going to press any more brightly-colored buttons. You never know what they might do.
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