Overcoming Blogger Bugs

I don't use Blogger because it's the most bug-free. In fact, I don't really use it because it is free. I use it because my data is free.

All my posts go where I want them, whether it be to Blogspot or my own FTP server. I can customize an HTML-based template which makes it easy to get the look I'm going for. And between these two things I can, at any time, pack up all my data and leave. About the only thing I've got invested in Blogger is certain URL's like http://csynapse.blogspot.com/. That's my own fault, of course, since they didn't force me to do it that way.

Anyway so there are bugs and missing features. Most of these I do without and I'm okay with it. Some of the bugs, however, get on my nerves a lot. I'm a programmer by nature and profession, and I tend to write posts containing code. Certain characters do not fit in HTML raw (in the buff), they must be escaped using entities. The ones you'll find I try to use often are less-than/greater-than signs, vertical bars (used for boolean OR logic), and ampersands. I'd type them here, but I'm afraid Blogger will barf on them and do something hideously incorrect with their spidery entrails.

So there's a dilemma, because I like to stick stuff here, but I haven't been able to with any amount of ease. You might've seen me post pictures of code rather than selectable text, well that's the reason why. I apologize for my laziness in not tracking down a better work-around.

Well, now they appear to have some weird kinda fix in place that will work as long as you translate all the entities up front. Prior to today, when I'd gone and typed the correct entities it would change them to characters and back to entities at weird moments, causing monumental fuck-ups in my code examples.

For example, if I want to see "<" in my post, then I have to type "&lt;" into the "Compose" window. And for me to give you that last example, I had to type "&amp;lt;" (and it grows and grows). That's exactly what Blogger used to do, actually, was continually grow the entities to absurb proportions.

If you type "<" by itself, then you will end up with weird results. Blogger will put an actual < character into the HTML, instead of the entity. Thus depending on your usage, you may end up creating what browsers see as a tag rather than content. Whoops!

All of this reinforces the fact that great technology does not win the users, it's the majority of functionality and the lack of commitment. Many of us will try something if we know there isn't much time or effort involved, and that when we want to we can bail with our skin intact.