Blogger: A Nightmare...

Well, I have to say that blogger is becoming a nightmare for me. I already wrote about versioning feature missing, but now I have four more complaints.

First, try to open some existing draft post and press ^Z constantly. What will happen is that at some point your complete post will disappear!? Now, your reflex will be to close edit tab without saving changes. But, that is a big mistake! Autosafe feature already kicked in and, no matter that you've said it's OK to lose changes, the post is gone for good. In other words autosafe feature should save independent copy of post, not overwrite the existing until I click Save button!

And while I'm at that, second thing that annoys me is that I sometimes click on some draft in order to see what I wrote in it, and autosafe feature saves unchanged version but it also updates a timestamp and this post comes to the top. I don't want it to be on top if I didn't change anything in it!

Third, if I change something, and later I'm not satisfied, there is no way I can revert changes. There is no way to make snapshots of the post.

Finally, the editor itself is catastrophic! It is simple, that's true, but that is everything that is positive about it. Sometimes, it will not allow you to add space, and frequently what you see in edit mode will be different from what you see in preview mode, not to mention different font sizes! One thing that it does is very annoying. If you click on one paragraph and make formatting changes (e.g. bold, font size) and then you go to the later part of the text (e.g. two paragraphs lower) it transfers formatting even though it is completely different!

Google! Can we get a better Blogging tool?! Or otherwise, I'll seriously start to consider switch to WordPress...

Disclaimer: I have to say that I'm using Firefox 16 with different plugins, among others NoScript and RequestPolicy which might influence Blogger's behavior. But I, as an ordinary user, don't have time to investigate this, and, I think NoScript is important component of my protection.

Request for Blogger feature: Versioning for posts....

Yesterday and today I was looking for a possibility to have post on blogger versioned, both, before and after it is published. What I want is to have ability to:

• track changes, especially after the post is published so that readers of the blog can request diff to see what I've changed (even though I usually only correct spelling and grammar errors),
• ability to fork a certain post, rewrite it and publish it as a new one with automatic tracking of those forks so that readers know that.

Also, I decided that my students will have to write blog about what are they doing for their diploma thesis (and other things they have to done during their studies under my supervision). But, I require from them not to publish a post until I review it. And there is a problem, the support for review process within blogger is very weak. Now, I know we can use LibreOffice or MS Office to do that, or just plain simple files, but I somehow think that it will add another layer of complexity to the process that is already not so simple. Not to mention editing.

So, does anyone know about some plugin, or how to request feature on blogger?