Blogger's UX annoys me

Back when we started this blag, there weren't many strong candidates as blogging platforms went. If you didn't want to pay but still wanted some options regarding ads, Blogger was the way to go. The platform was launched already back in 1999, and is often credited with popularizing the concept of web logs (blogs). Blogger was then acquired by Google in 2003, and by 2004 the platform had gone through a complete redesign, including the ability to upload pictures to blog posts. From there Blogger became the star of the blogosphere. Even through it has declined massively in the last years, I suspect there are still more Blogger blogs than those of e.g. Wordpress, Medium or Tumbler. But if I started blogging today, I surely wouldn't go for Blogger.

There are small things. Like the problems with comments not being published when posting on particular operating systems or browsers. Not being able to control line breaks and fonts well in the WYSIWYG editor. The un-intuitive acrobatics needed to upload a picture while using a smartphone. Encoding and pasting issues. How the pictures are stored, and how deleting a picture somewhere else may alter a crafted blogpost without warning due to cloud storage shenanigans. These are all things, I suppose. Still, they are not what I would consider real problems.

But I do take proper issue with three things on this platform. And together they form one coherent problem. I will now describe these issues using cards from The Dark, because I'm a nerd.

Issue One: Trying to be helpful by automatically doing stuff I don't necessarily want.

Auto-save. God damn auto-save. And I don't get how to shut it off. Sure, it can be helpful, like the automatic damage of The Fallen. But every now and then, some dude puts two Spirit Links on your The Fallen and suddenly the mana-burned monstrosity ends up giving the opponent life rather than taking it. And every now and then, you really don't want to save your changes but blogger still just does. There's no "may"-clause here. And you never have time to react.

Issue Two: A commonly preformed action may destroy your work.

Fasting isn't a very good card. Best case intended scenario is pretty much skipping four draw steps to gain 8 life. But the particularly rough thing is that as soon as you draw a card for any reason, Fasting is destroyed. It can be easy to just mindlessly draw a card at the beginning of your turn, accidentally destroying Fasting. Or to draw a card for some other reason, like activating a Sindbad and forgetting that his ability creates a draw trigger. Yeah, you shouldn't play sloppy, but Fasting would certainly not be very good even without that clause, and when the oucome of an easy mistake is to fully destroy the card, it creates feel-bad situations.

Here on Blogger, ctrl-Z will undo the actions from the current session one-by-one until the list of current session actions are empty, and then will just clear everything in the post. So if you open a draft post to e.g. upload three images, realize that you pasted the images in the wrong place, and then do ctrl-Z but accidentally do it four times instead of three, then the entire draft post will be blank. And crtl-shift-Z or ctrl-Y to 'redo' doesn't work here.

Issue Three: If it's not published, it is not remembered.

Before a post is published, it will have no revision history. It could have been worked on for days over dozens of sessions, thousands of words, but as long as it is unpublished it is considered a draft without memory nor history. You have what was saved last, but no version control.   

Individually, these three issues are at most a nuisance, but I'd like you to consider what combining them means. Then we have some Merfolk Assassin / War Barge killer combo shit.

A picture: I opened a draft post to finish it, but realized that the last paragraph I just wrote wasn't any good. So I pressed ctrl-Z a few times to remove it. But I accidentally pressed it one time too much, and suddenly everything I've written disappears. Panicking, I press back to get out of the editor, but it's too late and the blogpost is already auto-saved as an empty file. There is no history of anything ever being written there. All work is lost and overwritten.

Nothing clever here, just my face every time this happens.

The other day marked the third time in just over a year one of my longer posts suffered this fate. I guess I could move over to Medium or some other new-fangled platform at some point, or maybe just code up my own webpage to host the blag and not use a platform at all to avoid these problems. Regardless, I'm unable to re-write the post right now as I'm not in Oslo and don't have access to the files and magazines I needed for it. Maybe I will redo it, maybe I wont. But it was an annoying surprise.

Two cool things though. One, I'm not in Oslo because I'm in Gothenburg. A year and a half in varied levels of stasis is finally over, and I'm back in my cradle city with my family. The second sweet thing is that I found a full set of The Dark. The Dark is rad. Not as rad as being able to travel to Sweden, but pretty damn rad still. Let's write something about that soon.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3BPcfGY