The End is near ..

The end is near .. just kidding. At the end of the last week (to be precise on September 19th), Google as provider/hoster of the Blogspot blogging platform has decided in its eternal wisdom to make the new interface (editor) mandatory to use. Unfortunately the new interface/editor is annoying as hell. Just some of its issues:

• The back button of the Internet browser is more often not working than it does.
• No filtering and searching of posts at the same time.
• The blog overview offers a "New Blog" button, whereas a "New Post" button, would have been much more useful.
• The interface has little to no contrast, it's all white with very light grey. Loss of orientation guaranteed.
• The posts overview is now multi-line, that is each post now occupies two or even three lines in the "table" of posts (depending on the browser width). (Unfortunately, this is also the case with WordPress).
• Each post has to be marked for use of the line break tag (br). Formatting with regards to line breaks/empty lines has become more cumbersome.
• Pages (not posts) created with the old editor cannot be edited directly (using the little pen symbol) anymore. You have to go via the "Pages" page.
• In general, navigation around the interface has become a nuisance.

So currently I am strongly considering moving to another blogging platform, namely WordPress, which I started looking at more seriously lately.


But it's not all shiny in the WordPress world as well, starting with the conversion process of the blogger posts I was trying to migrate from blogger to the new site.

• Colors are sometimes not converted, especially when used in conjunction with the bold style tag.
• Picture sizes are not converted. The migrated picture is always shown in the original size.
• Picture alignment is always set to left (and I had most of the embedded pictures set to middle or right.

And this is only the transitional stuff. Much more annoying are the following points:

• For customizing the blog in certain areas (colors, for example) you have to pay.
• Whereas advertisements on blogger was an opt-in, you have opt-out for ads and you have to pay for avoiding ads altogether (although I haven't seen any of them yet).

But all in all I have the impression, that WordPress is the more professional platform, but you have to pay for some extra features and niceties, whereas Google gives away their services for free (and earns by placing ads for those who wish to earn some pennies). But the later leads to some user unfriendly decisions. Plus Google always seems to rely on a rather strange fault-tolerant approach .. if it doesn't work, don't worry .. the user can always click again (or type again). (See also Google Groups which has also become unusable as well. Search results disappear, the tree view for posts cannot be found anymore (at least I can't), etc.)


Post Scriptum: In the meantime, I have already started the migration process, and my plans are to switch on October 1st to WordPress. I will give notice (and more details when this is happening).