Confessions of a Chronic Dork

Singing along to: Counting Crows, Mrs. Potter's Lullaby

I may have mentioned before that I really, really, hate change. You know, just a little bit.

(If it's possible to digress from one's original point before one even begins to make it, that's what I'm about to do, because it just occurred to me that perhaps this discomfort with change has something to do with my general indifference to technology. Sure, I've wholeheartedly embraced the Internet, but on the whole, technology is a whole lot of bother, despite all the pretty blinking lights. That's because every time you think that perhaps you have it figured out now, they come up with another damn version and you have to learn it all over again. Some people, I think, genuinely enjoy this process. I loathe it.)

Actually, that wasn't a digression at all, but instead a rather elegant, if unplanned, introduction to my main point:

Blogger, I hate you.

I was cool with Blogger. They changed awhile back, but not too drastically and on the whole, I could adjust. But now they're doing a major overhaul of everything, as part of a shift into "Blogger Beta." (Technically, I could have stayed with Blogger Alpha, or whatever it's called, but only for a few weeks, and then they'd force a change, so I figured I might as well bite the bullet and do it now. Consider it a several-week headstart on complaining.) Mostly what it seems to do is meld my Blogger account and my Google account, about which I couldn't care less, but it also involves a complete change in the way the templates work, making them more point-and-click friendly, but less fiddle-with-HTML friendly. So I played with their point-and-click thing awhile and it's pretty slick, but I realized that I was just using it to make my blog look exactly like what it had looked like before, except without much luck, since I'm used to my blog's rather antiquated 3+ year old HTML. For instance, I couldn't figure out where to put the code for the freaking awesome grammar banner along the bottom. Also, the sidebar took up like half the screen and didn't seem to be adjustable. Oh, and it wanted to make the titles of my posts into permalinks and I couldn't figure out how to undo it because it's UGLY and I already have it set up so I can link to individual posts (click on the little double colon [::] underneath each post). Little stuff like that. So I went back to my old "classic" template. It means I'll have to forego the one feature I truly wanted, the ability to label posts and sort them by that label (for a demonstration of this, see Beth), but if I've lived without 'em for three years, I think I'll survive for awhile yet.

So the moral of the story is this:

I hate changes. I hate Blogger. I'm too worked up to sleep.

The end.