Sunday, May 04, 2008
Why do I keep doing this?
Singing along to: The Beatles, Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
Depending on when you read this post, you may notice that things look a little different. This is not likely to last.
I have been a Blogger user since the day I began blogging, which is actually five years ago this month. And screw all the haters, I like Blogger, most of the time, and since there's almost nothing in this life that I like all the time, that is actually a ringing endorsement. I know that Blogger is not very sophisticated, and that it sometimes does crazy things, and that half of the blogs on Blogger are just foreign-language spam blogs, and that Blogger is probably a key element in Google's plot to take over the world, but I still feel bad when the Internet picks on Blogger and the people who use it.
That said, I have still not gotten over the frustration I felt when they switched over to the new fancy template stuff. That was almost two years ago, and I am A) still stewing over it, and B) still using the "classic" template that I started out with.
Except right now I'm not.
Several times since Blogger made the switchover, I have decided to try their new templates again, and every time I give up in frustration and switch back to classic.* This time, I gave it a try because I thought maybe I could incorporate Twitter more gracefully, as well as add some sort of useless "What I'm reading/listening to/digging right now" thing, which is possible in the classic template, I just can't make it pretty. So I backed up my old template in Notepad and made the switch.
I'm about to switch right back, because I still hate the new version, for most of the same reasons that I hated it back in 2006. If resisting change were an Olympic sport, I would be a gold medalist. I mean, my sidebar doesn't have to be that wide. I don't want to screw around with damn CSS to make my post titles not links, because convenience be damned, they just look ugly that way. I still haven't figured out how to add Twitter to my sidebar, or my intimidating copyright message to the footer. I appreciate that other people can figure out these things, and make their blogs look lovely, but I have neither the patience nor the inclination to spend time thinking about those things.
(This may, in fact, be why Wordpress, which the Internet generally acknowledges OMG AWESOME, frustrates me so much. Its practically infinite potential for customization seems to call for almost equally infinite ability to customize, on the part of the user. And frankly, I blog because I want to write, not because I want to spend a lot of time learning CSS, although that is on my to-do list.)
*You know what they say about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
PS: I just took one of Blogger's customer satisfaction surveys and told them that I still hate the new templates. Not that they care.
Depending on when you read this post, you may notice that things look a little different. This is not likely to last.
I have been a Blogger user since the day I began blogging, which is actually five years ago this month. And screw all the haters, I like Blogger, most of the time, and since there's almost nothing in this life that I like all the time, that is actually a ringing endorsement. I know that Blogger is not very sophisticated, and that it sometimes does crazy things, and that half of the blogs on Blogger are just foreign-language spam blogs, and that Blogger is probably a key element in Google's plot to take over the world, but I still feel bad when the Internet picks on Blogger and the people who use it.
That said, I have still not gotten over the frustration I felt when they switched over to the new fancy template stuff. That was almost two years ago, and I am A) still stewing over it, and B) still using the "classic" template that I started out with.
Except right now I'm not.
Several times since Blogger made the switchover, I have decided to try their new templates again, and every time I give up in frustration and switch back to classic.* This time, I gave it a try because I thought maybe I could incorporate Twitter more gracefully, as well as add some sort of useless "What I'm reading/listening to/digging right now" thing, which is possible in the classic template, I just can't make it pretty. So I backed up my old template in Notepad and made the switch.
I'm about to switch right back, because I still hate the new version, for most of the same reasons that I hated it back in 2006. If resisting change were an Olympic sport, I would be a gold medalist. I mean, my sidebar doesn't have to be that wide. I don't want to screw around with damn CSS to make my post titles not links, because convenience be damned, they just look ugly that way. I still haven't figured out how to add Twitter to my sidebar, or my intimidating copyright message to the footer. I appreciate that other people can figure out these things, and make their blogs look lovely, but I have neither the patience nor the inclination to spend time thinking about those things.
(This may, in fact, be why Wordpress, which the Internet generally acknowledges OMG AWESOME, frustrates me so much. Its practically infinite potential for customization seems to call for almost equally infinite ability to customize, on the part of the user. And frankly, I blog because I want to write, not because I want to spend a lot of time learning CSS, although that is on my to-do list.)
*You know what they say about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
PS: I just took one of Blogger's customer satisfaction surveys and told them that I still hate the new templates. Not that they care.
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