Blogger: Learn LESS

Blogger has reached a new level of stupdity in the last 24 hours. Their new word verification system for comments displays visual garbage that is very difficult to read. So I went to the settings section of the blog configuration to see if there were any options that could help. This is what I find:

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This will require people leaving comments on your blog to complete a word verification step, which will help reduce comment spam. Learn more

Blog authors will not see word verification for comments.
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Okay, see that [ Learn more ] ? It was a hyperlink, but when I clicked it, I get an ERROR message, there is NO help! There is NO-thing else to "learn". Sounds familiar.


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We're sorry, but the information you've requested cannot be found. Please try searching or browsing the Help Center.
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It appears that Blogger has hired some of the same programming and design idiots that have recently i_rnpr^ov_ecl Facebook.

Example of a Very Bad Word Verification

Update: I turned off the Word Verification for comments, but left the approval step in place. NOW the system has this error: The next comment that was left for my blog showed up twice. So I have to approve one and then manually delete the second one!


Update: NOW about one day later I have had to turn Word Verification back ON for comments because I am getting flooded with robotic spam messages filling up my inbox on my email as well as showing up in the Is This Spam inbox of Blogger.

Dear Blogger

Dear Blogger,

Please get your act together concerning your web tools that lists my followers on my blog web page. At the moment I only have a handful, 15, and your software does not works properly.

Silly Symptoms:

A) on my web page it some times display all 15 people, but most of the time it omits the most recent three people who have joined. I don't want these people to think I have dropped them!

B) on my Blogger dashboard it typically displays 14 people as just a number instead of the correct number 15, BUT ...

C) when you click on the button of the dashboard to display the people, it is hit-or-miss whether it is going to work at all, or display the complete list. Sometimes it displays 12, sometimes 15. Typically refreshing the browser window corrects the problem and *automagically* all 15 people will appear.

Blogger also lost my profile picture! I have been using the same one for most of my existence on this blog, greater than 4 years. It was a dynamic GIF file that changed shadows and contrast rapidly. I had spent quite a bit of time building it. Gone. They replaced my special picture with some ordinary monochromatic silhouette humanoid blob. If there is something I am not, its a blob!!!

I suddenly thought of something else to check about the GIF animated files. My blog post Green With INVI has a GIF picture that has one of my fingers slowly ghosting away and reappearing in an infinite loop, as part of my story about inventing invisible paint. So I checked this story and sure enough that picture is "broken" as well. So either Blogger suddenly stopped supporting GIF animated picture files or possibly its a fresh iPad problem. I haven't been on a real PC since discovering the problem. I know that GIFs did work on my iPad. Hmmm....

Update: I checked the animated GIFs on a PC and the problem still persists. I remember now there is another story with a poem that has an animated picture that is sure to be broken ..checking.. yes, the picture at Billy Bonka, Bubba and the Magical Ball Factory is broken as well. It had an animated picture that has a large green tomato on the vine turning into a tennis ball and back, on an infinite loop.

D i s a p p o i n t m e n t

Animated GIF files have been around for quite some time and it seems silly that Blogger would drop their support for them. I tried another trick. I tried googling for the image by putting in the name of the blog post, and it gave me the correct image, BUT it was just a single still image of the tomato on the vine, not the wonderful magical tomato turning into a tennis ball and back on an infinite loop.

AND ... while I was editing this blog post the system generated an error message telling me that it couldn't save the post due to some mysterious error. I tried eliminating everything html-ish besides pure displayable text, but nothing helped. Finally I guessed that the stupid system had probably logged me off while I was right in the middle of editing, and sure enough, that was the problem!!! How can this happen, surely it wasn't a timeout issue. Hopefully it wasn't because I just happen to be simultaneously logged in to the same account on my iPad at home, which of course no one is using, unless Cooper my dog is a whole lot smarter than I thought he was, AND able to manipulate my iPad with his claws. That could account for a few scratches, though. If he is manipulating the touchscreen with his NOSE, I don't want to know about it. Luckily I have learned that I can copy and paste the What You See Is What You Are About To Lose contents of my blogger editting process to somewhere else, namely Notepad on my PC.

I checked the blogger system status over at downrightnow.com/blogger and everything looks fine and hunky-dory.

Thanks,

Ernest