Many people must already be aware that Blogger, the web content management system I have used to do FmH since its inception in 1999, unveiled a major redesign this weekend. People had been waiting to see if Google, which acquired Blogger over the past year, would put any resources into it, and now we have it. So far, most commentators are favorably impressed by fawning over blogger.new, pointing to new templates designed by luminarites like Zeldman and all standards-compliant; per-post pages; an in-house commenting system — “the kind of things that we’ve come to expect from a modern blogging tool.”
I on the other hand am not so impressed, and it is not merely nostalgia. Am I the only naysayer?? I don’t need no steenkin’ canned template; I enabled the comments system but could not get it to work (so we’re still stuck with the imperfect but better-‘n-nothing Enetation for now…); without their commenting system enabled, per-post pages are just going to clog my storage capacity on FmH’s webhost pretty soon; and I find the new interface much clunkier to use for my purposes. A number of the macros I have written over the years to automate posting and maintenance functions now go into the trash. And republishing speed seems to have plummeted.
Most seriously, there were no indications this was coming and no consultation with their user base. Just this week, I was corresponding with Blogger tech support because their posting interface page was broken in newer versions (>1.6)of the Mozilla browser. Why didn’t they tell me it was a moot point because, in less than a week, the interface was going to be obsoleted anyway? [That is the only silver lining in this cloud for me so far; that the only obstacle to my updating my Mozilla is hereby removed…]
In any case, I am stuck with the change until I make a major move to a different publishing system, something I do not have the time to engineer anytime soon (requiring, as it would, exporting and importing almost five years of posts, rewriting and tweaking my page templates from scratch, and switching to a new webhost…). Please let me know if you see any new glitches in the design or rendering of FmH that might be attributable to this blogging revolution.
