Blogger continues to annoy me. I really hate using any feature on that site. And I always cringe – at best – whenever I leave a comment on a blog hosted there. Usually, commenting involves weeping and gnashing of teeth. Three things currently that annoy me about Blogger:
# *Word Verification* – Technically, it’s _image_ verification. The gobbledygook they put up for you to type in a verify that you are not, in fact, a bot aren’t actually words. Ok, it’s a _minor_ annoyance and not technically anything that’s worthy of weeping.
# *Popup Comment Forms* – Now _these_ things hurt. A lot. Blogger does not like Firefox, it seems. Those of you who use Blogger and elect to have the comment form appear in a popup window instead of in a regular browser screen like everything else on your site? Yeah, I hate you. For some reason, the popup window in Firefox doesn’t fill out to the form’s full size, nor do scrollbars appear to rectify that issue. Needless to say, it makes it a royal pain to leave a comment. And most of the time, I don’t. So as a personal favor to me (and every other Firefox user who reads your site), please change that option. Please. I even asked nicely.
# *No Tab-throughs?* – In Blogger the Elder, it was possible to type in one’s comment, tab to the image verification field, tab to the identifications options to select one, tab to the name field, tab to the website field, and then tab to the ‘Submit’ button, where you could then hit ‘Enter’ to submit everything – all without ever touching the mouse. No longer. The new-and-improved (yeah, right) Blogger Junior requires you to mouse-click absolutely everything. Those of us who use the mouse as infrequently as we possibly can hate this fact and wish with all our hearts that Blogger (a.k.a. Google) would fix this.
Yeah, I really dislike Blogger. Bet you couldn’t tell.
Jim, yeah, blogger’s been getting on my nerves. The comments are also sometimes funky with “word verification” (which is the only comment spam blocker option) and then comments you’ve typed in drop to the null bucket. The tab thing also annoys me. So does their “new and improved” layout tools (I went back to straight HTML editing with them).
Blogger was great to get started with. Now I’m lusting after WordPress or Movable Type. A friend of mine does hosting so I can get some bandwidth and sever space cheap. Just need to adjust the cash flow and find a weekend to play with it.
The self-hosted WP is great, but wordpress.com is also rather nice. And I believe that both now import the new Blogger format, which makes things really slick.
BTW – I wasn’t necessarily ranting about your site, in particular. I’ve got a number of friends and folks I read over on Blogger. I just hate interacting with the site and have had to do more of it than I like recently. But I do like to at least give feedback, so I bite down and do it. Thanks for stopping back by. :)
Word verification doesn’t bother me in the way you describe. I’m annoyed by characters in the image that are completely illegible to a mortal.
The comment boxes usually work ok for me in Firefox.
New Blogger seems to be much more annoying than Old Blogger.
Jim, no worries. For me it’s also on all the other peoples blogs I comment on (once I’m logged in, I don’t have to “word verify” for my own blog, but the non-tabbable interface just irks me). I’ve seen that link for wordpress.com, and I guess I need to get my butt in gear and check it out.
Yes, that’s one of the other things about word verification I don’t like, Jean – a lot of captchas produce letters you can’t read, so you then have to enter the ‘word’ several times before you get one you can read. I used one here back in the early days of this blog, but then Akismet appeared and Bad Behavior sometime after that. I won’t ever use word verification again, if it can be helped. It’s just better and easier for my readers that way.
I’m not sure on the comment boxes – I just know that the popups are too small for the comment form and miscellany and I have no option to either scroll around or resize. Very annoying.
Steve, I’m a HUGE WordPress fan. Heck, nearly my entire site is powered by several instances of the software. It just does everything I’ve ever wanted in a dynamic website and is nearly infinitely customizable these days. And even the wordpress.com blogs, which are more limited in what you can do with them by necessity, beat out just about every other blogging site I’ve run across. Granted, wordpress.com is technically something like an ongoing beta for WordPress and therefore has periodic problems when they try out new things (I’ve a friend who’s been turned off by this fact), but in my opinion, it’s still far better than anything else.
Anyway, enough “preaching” from me. :)
I really don’t like blogger much either. I have mastered hitting Ctrl-T in the comment window and then dragging the original comment tab back to the main browser that I started in.
The thing I find annoying about “word” verification is the need to type an 8 or 9 character string. Would anything less than 5 letters cause unwanted spam??
What I find agonizing about viewing the comments in a teensy window is that if you click on a user’s website, you see said website in the same dinky window. I find that if I want to see the whole page, I need to right click and choose Open Link in New Window.
Other than those complaints, Blogger really sucks.