Thursday, April 19, 2012

Seriously?

I found bloggers's old dashboard is toast as of today, and I'm stuck with this new and not streamlined, not easier to use interface.  This is the second time this week that what used to be a lovely webpage has been totally changed. The other is USGS's recent earthquake page, the changes to which vex me far more than the changes here.  They've made their site damn near unusable compared to what it used to be.  This looks like just a pain to re-learn and find where everything went.  Like so far, I haven't located where they moved all the blogs I follow.  I'm sure it's here.  I just need to poke and click on everything until I find it.  I work for a software company, so I know why software changes... but that doesn't mean I like it.  Not one bit. 

Yeah, frustrated.

1 comment:

Laura said...

Deb, I'm so glad you posted this! I've been on blogger for nearly 7 years and am beyond frustrated with the current change.

Although most bloggers don't do it anymore, I've always had my post title link to something relevant to the post (i.e., my movie review titles always link to the movie's IMDb page). I've figured out how to make the title in the new format link to something -- *but* have discovered when I do this, the individual blog posts won't open in the mobile version of my blog on my iPhone. If I don't have the post title link to anywhere, the post opens fine. I still don't understand that one.

And it's now impossible to moderate comments on my phone, whether I click "moderate" in a notifying email or try to log into my account. I either can't get to the moderation page or I get there and click "publish" but nothing happens.

I tried going back to the old Blogger interface (there's a place to do it by clicking a "cog" symbol and choosing it) but discovered it is no longer working smoothly as it used to. I've always written my posts on the HTML page because "Compose" is glitchy (links get corrupted, etc.), then I switch to "Compose" to put in photos when I'm done writing. But when I did this over the weekend, I discovered that my post viewed in "Compose" didn't have any paragraphing! I had to put paragraphs in by hitting enter...which then put a bunch of cluttered "break" coding onto the HTML page. I guess that doesn't matter since Blogger says the old interface is going away by next week.

In the new version it's quite hard to find some things and it took me forever to figure out why I suddenly had paragraph break coding writing posts in HTML. Finally I found a place to click to remove the coding and use "enter" for paragraphing.

And of course this change happened when I had a lot of posts I wanted to share from the noir festival -- took forever to get them written!

I never mind changes that are *useful* and *make sense*. But change for change's sake, moving the user backwards in terms of usability...grrrr.

Thank you for letting me vent!!!!!!!!! I feel your pain!!

Best wishes,
Laura