Monday, December 11, 2006
Blogger sucks
I know many people idolize Google (and this seems to give their employees unlimited license to blog with complete ignorance), but other than the search engine and Google maps, they don't have any good products. Everything else is typical Java web trash. Blogger seems to be suffering from more reliability problems lately, and the "publishing" process is annoying. Also I don't like the way newlines in the blog entry editor are converted to <br>'s; this makes it hard to paste HTML from another source, you have to merge it all into one line first (but there might be a way to disable this line break behavior). All in all, blogger might be great if you just want to post rants about how dynamically typed languages don't support refactoring (ahem), but it is a poor product overall. Still beats JRoller, though.
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2 comments:
Blogger was a Google acquisition, probably acquired for userbase. I think they'll eventually fix it.
I would say that Google offers lots of valuable stuff beyond search and maps, such as Groups and Mail. Google has consistently improved Groups since the DejaNews acquisition, and the UI of Mail/Groups I think is far better than the traditional folder/tree paradigm most reader applications use.
Email folders are an incredibly limited way of organizing mail, especially conservations, and tagging is a nature fit. The streamlined and simplified Google mail UI, which refrained from the usage "AJAX Overload" technique of trying to make a Outlook/Thunderbird/Eudora clone via Javascript (e.g. Yahoo Mail) I think is very nice, and I wish desktop mail readers like Thunderbird adopted it.
The problem with most Blog software is the lack of macros/metaprogramming. Naturally, as one blogs more and more, especially on common subjects, one wants reusable markup to do things like show sample code, quote other blogs, markup math, etc. And while some blog software has builtin stuff (like [code]), it would be nice if they offered an extensible language for user definition of macros. Many Wikis already allow user defined macros for example.
Alas, most blogs only leave you with CSS and HTML.
Yes, it sucks. When I deleted my old blog, somebody else took it over to spam immediately as many other deleted blogs. Google did nothing to stop that.
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