So I've had this blog for a little over two months at this point, rather erratic posting schedule aside, so I think I'm slowly getting used to this blogger thing. Enough thatbi think I can go into my feelings with regards to it as a blogging software anyway.
And honestly, truly honestly?
I wish I didn't have to use it.
It sounds bad, I know. But author, I can hear you thinking to yourself, why then do you subject yourself to something you don't like?
Because shut up I reply, rather testy that you would dare to break into my thought process with your incredibly rude question.
After a bit of a cool off period on my end, because frankly such an outburst is, well, maybe not unwarranted, but rather rude, and I'm a better host than that, so I suppose I should offer slightly more than that. On the whole, then, Blogger is a halfway decent blogging software. If you don't want to bother with much HTML (And who does?), then it'll do pretty much all the heavy lifting for you.
There are some downsides though. For example, whenever I copy/paste a line of whatever using my Mac, it decides to bring in some weird code that completely screws up the formatting. For example, look at my sales post I made yesterday. See those blue backgrounds behind the words?
I didn't code that specially to make those stand out. I only left it in because I liked the way it looked. Honestly, the code for that entry is ugly as hell. So's the code for the Super Metroid entry too.
Beyond that though, without a lot of work, the actual blog does not look good. Mine, visually, is passable, and that's by and large because I made a lot of work using the template editor, and I have been entirely too lazy to go in and edit the actual HTML. One of these days.
But yeah. I wouldn't really suggest it if you want a lot of control over your blogging. I'm not going to continue using whenever I get around to finding out how I can purchase www.scanvisor.com I'm going to go ahead and switch to WordPress. For the time being though?
That'll do Blogger, that'll do.
I agree, Blogger doesn't offer users much control over HTML and isn't the greatest platform for "professional" blogging. But, it's free, and you can basically start a blog in minutes without any headaches. However, it does have some formatting limitations (especially when it comes to indentation).
ReplyDeleteAs for the blue background issue, I'm guessing you copied the text from Word or another source with formatted text? All the blue sections have span tags of the class "Apple-style-span." Blogger doesn't play nicely with pre-formatted text and adds all kinds of funky HTML in an attempt to preserve the original formatting. The easiest solution is to copy and paste the text into Notepad, then copy and paste the non-formatted text from Notepad into Blogger.
Try adding some indents and styles to a word doc, then look at the HTML blogger generates when you paste that formatted doc into the post editor. You'll probably see a lot of poorly placed span tags that do funny things.
If that's not the problem here, I'm stumped.
Fun fact #1: Your comment was deemed to be spam randomly. Way to keep my blog safe from discussion Google. Almost makes me want to downgrade your software from "adequate" to "buggy". OH WAIT.
ReplyDeleteFun fact #2: The blue actually comes from the background of the forum that my list was posted to first, as seen here. As far as I can tell, the Apple spam code happens every time I use copy/paste with my OS X machines. I don't know if there is specific tagging for iOS, Windows, or Android machines though.
And because I don't know this for sure, and I'm not exactly trying for a serious argument, I'm going to say that this is just an extension of Google's war with Apple, a battle that has raged longer than the sun has risen in the East.
(Ok, I'd actually guess that it's a weird interaction that the Compose view has with OS X conventions, and that it'd disappear if I used the HTML view. But it's more fun wearing the tin hat.)