10 ms·

Google, nobody asked for a new Blogger interface

motohagiography 6y ago
I'm trying to think of internet brands that have successfully reinvented themselves, like analogous to an alternate universe where Myspace relaunches and becomes a thing. Maybe blogspot is a going concern, but it seems like the Altavista of internet publishing to me. Winner may take all in network effect companies, but does it mean you also only get one shot, or is there a "retro" effect online too? To adapt another adage, users don't leave products, they leave communities. The idea of starting a new blog on blogspot doesn't really register for me anymore. Or maybe I'm out of touch?
pier25 6y ago
I thought Google had completely abandoned Blogger. Is there a reason they are investing in it again?
- genericone 6y ago
  An ambitious/driven PM was put on the project, and he/she is making more aggressive demands than all the ones in the last 10 years <- opinion
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Somebody wanted to get promoted and needed to show "impact". Count your blessings that they didn't decide to show impact by creating yet another google chat app.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    At some point this sort of response to every post with "Google" in the title became akin to responding "First!!" on every post. That point was, frankly, something like a year ago.
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      I think you're talking about the second sentence in my post, when really that was just a joke. The main point was that it was probably done by someone looking to show an impact for promotion, which I don't think is a HN meme regarding google, like (n+1 chat apps, google eats your privacy, what will google deprecate next) are.
- ma2rten 6y ago
  The same reason that some other Google products have been redesigned recently: They used GWT and GWT has been deprecated.
  - pier25 6y ago
    When they launched the last Gmail redesign in 2018 I used an extension to check what they had used and it showed up Vue: https://twitter.com/PierB/status/989630991051476992 https://twitter.com/PierB/status/989630991051476992 It doesn't show up anymore so they probably obfuscated it.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ma2rten 6y ago
      Gmail uses Wiz. The extension was probably misclassifying it. https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/958696304149868545 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/958696304149868545
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    Non-UI code is able to be compiled with J2CL, which shares GWT's runtime. However, the UI would have to be replaced with Wiz.
  - thisistheend123 6y ago
    I have a newbie question. Since blogger is such a stable platform and hasn't seen much change feature wise for sometime now, why does one have to rewrite it if some framework that is uses has been deprecated. Just asking.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Protecting it from security holes in the framework would be one reason. Ensuring somebody in your org still knows how it works and could fix stuff in a pinch, is another.
  - 6y ago
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  Too many UI designers and not enough real work for them to do? Seems to me there's far too much of that sort of thing going on in the software economy (not just UI designers!) -- far too much redeveloping existing wheels (and usually not for the better) and far too little actual advancement of the state of the art, far too little actual innovation.
justicezyx 6y ago
Google engineers wanted impact to get promoted, consider this a natural result (or whatever other rationale that does not put user satisfaction as the first criteria)
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it was updated because it depended on obsolete libraries. Presumably the new libraries made the new design more straightforward to implement than attempting to reproduce the existing one.
  - mikro2nd 6y ago
    What, exactly, was "obsolete" about those libraries. Did the code stop executing? Were they written in languages whose compilers/interpreters stopped functioning? Or were there simply newer, shinier toys to play with?
    - coliveira 6y ago
      If it was written in python, it can really stop working. Most companies are transitioning to Python3.
      - coliveira 6y ago
        If you think I'm joking, there are huge companies that have already declared Python2 as non-supported software, so if you have any software written in Python2 you have to either rewrite or stop using it.
    - oblio 6y ago
      Absolutely everything connected to the internet needs to be kept up to date for a simple reason. Security. We're past the 90's when "the code stopped executing" was the only valid reason for an update :-)
8note 6y ago
I imagine you don't have to worry about it for very long; next they'll announce that it's shutting down and that you can use the YouTube community tab instead
- istorical 6y ago
  they will let you know you have a month to transfer your blog to YouTube community, and at the end of that period if you haven't transitioned (a process whose ramifications in terms of privacy and how it affects your ability to keep separate identities on different platforms are entirely opaque) your entire blog will be deleted and lost forever.
est 6y ago
Ok nobody asked but what about the guy at Blogger team who's role is to make up bullshit OKRs and get promotions?
- V-eHGsd_ 6y ago
  spoken like someone who remembers the kennedy announcement.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    And for those who may not, the 2011 "Kennedy" UI initiative at Google. https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620566
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      These kind of announcements probably happen all the time within Apple, why do people rage when someone else tries to fix UI inconsistency in L&F and behavior, but Apple does it by changing what you're use to without asking you, and nary a peep? At least other companies sometimes let you keep the old theme/skin for awhile.
      - V-eHGsd_ 6y ago
        so, this isn't kennedy-specific, but from a mostly outsider's perspective (I worked at google for a long long time, but not on any of this stuff), I think it's motive. apple sells hardware to users & google sells eyeballs to advertisers. the most benign explanation for google's constant UI redesign is that it is, as the GP said, some "guy on blogger team who's role is to make up bullshit OKRs and get promotions". as a user of these products, that pointless churn is incredibly frustrating. The less benign explanation is that it's about increasing my eyeball time for advertisers. as a human being, that's incredibly infuriating; especially when the "redesign" doesn't offer me anything in return (I'm looking at you google music / youtube music)
michaelsitver 6y ago
I'm shocked Blogger made any changes at all. Always assumed they were in maintainance mode. I'm really curious how many people are still on the blogger team at Google.
- frouge 6y ago
  They had to give them some work
ezoe 6y ago
These days, I am thinking that relying heavily on a particular Blog service has a risk. Those services will be eventually gone. Blogger is no exception. Like all the services Google purchased and abandoned in the past. I don't want to risk losing all the writings I intended to publish on the Internet. But, blogging is not that important enough for me to set up a my very own dedicated web server. So, these days, I'm simply using GitHub Pages for the blog. I realized all I need is to host static HTML files. I can write locally with my favourite text editor, git commit & git push to publish it. No need to use web browser at all. Even if GitHub is gone, I have entire data on my multiple storages I owned and rented. I can do this with other Blog services but I have to automate the web browser operation to copy&paste the writings for each blog services, which is not necessary if I simply use GitHub.
- Shared404 6y ago
  > But, blogging is not that important enough for me to set up a my very own dedicated web server. If for some reason you wind up wanting to move off of GitHub, I've found Linodes bottom tier to be great for hosting a small static site. You do have to configure the webserver yourself of course, but it's a step down in complexity from self hosting.
dwheeler 6y ago
If you want to be in control, the solution has always been the same: own your own domain, and post there. If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their content, and they're in control of it, not you. No matter what is claimed otherwise. Yes, it's harder. Getting visibility is also harder. It's still the only solution if you want to be in control. It's okay to pay someone to run the blogging platform, etc., as long as you own the domain name & can decide what it points to. You can then switch providers, switch systems you use, or whatever you want to do. But if you don't control the domain name, someone else is in control.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Good advice, but this rant is about the tool not the domain ownership though. You can own your own domain and use Wordpress self-hosted, then find they updated the UI constantly as you upgrade it keep it up to date for - you know - security. The only way to get the level of control long term is probably sadly a static site generation kind of a thing. There was a HN post about "software that is no longer changed but still used" as I am paraphrasing and this is an interesting idea. A GUI blogging platform that ends it's life and stays as-is forever would be cool, even if it lack funky features, maybe you enter the HTML yourself.
  - dwheeler 6y ago
    I agree, you can own your own domain name without having to do everything yourself. Like anything else, if you don't want to do something, hire somebody else to do it. I own my own domain name, and then pay others to take care of my website. I chose a cheap one for now. If I don't like their service, I can move my content somewhere else in the future. I could even have it hosted for free on GitHub, if I'm willing to live with him there constraints on static servers. But I own the domain name, so no one can just take it down without any recourse. If someone decides to stop providing me a service, I can just take my stuff somewhere else. Of course, you have to have a backup of the data, and use tools that are available elsewhere. But that really isn't that difficult. Static sites are really easy to manage this way. If you want something beyond the static site, it's not hard to use tools like WordPress which are open source software and widely available elsewhere. (Be cautious about adding plugins to Wordpress, some of them are security disasters, but at least you get to choose what you use.)
LordAtlas 6y ago
Rather ironic that the post mentions things like accessibility while using a blog layout that is not responsive on mobiles, and looks like crap with tiny, unreadable text on large screens.
troyjfarrell 6y ago
Sandstorm has accidentally solved the problem of rapid change by not having enough developers to continually update the available applications, which include Wordpress. You can also ignore updates. Thankfully, the architecture of Sandstorm turns many types of vulnerabilities in the installed applications into non-events. This means that the lack of updates is not so alarming. https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-non-events/#wordpress https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-non-event...
- Santosh83 6y ago
  Good to hear Sandstorm is still alive! It is precisely the kind of thing that has some chance of making self hosted popular among the wider public, instead of ever shrinking patches maintained by die-hard enthusiasts inside a sea of corporate silos.
charliebrownau 6y ago
Check out free speech blog platform - Publish0x
susam 6y ago
> I'm probably the last person on earth to do so, but I write my posts in raw HTML. Although I don't use Blogger/Blogspot anymore and I render my blog using a static site generator [1], I too write my posts in raw HTML [2]. In the past, the differences in how various tools interpret and render some of the corner case scenarios like nested lists, code blocks or blockquotes nested within lists, etc. caused issues in porting my Markdown files from one system to another. Granted, there is CommonMark now and I think it is a pretty good specification but it is not a standard like HTML5 is. I prefer standards, so that I know with a reasonable degree of confidence that what I write now would look the same 10 years from now. [1]: https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite (Disclosure: My wife developed this project) [2]: https://github.com/susam/susam.in/tree/master/content/blog https://github.com/susam/susam.in/tree/master/content/blog
cblconfederate 6y ago
Ooh yes is so blatantly obvious that this is some developers' vanity project that he enthusiastically promoted in order to get his own promotion. Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface. Great developers like this should stay in google forever. Similar thing with paypal's redesign
- tspike 6y ago
  > just some developers' vanity project I think you underestimate the number of people involved in these kinds of projects.. guarantee there were multiple product managers, a host of UX designers, engineering managers, and devs. It's much harder for a developer to get a thing like this through than a product person.
  - srean 6y ago
    A problem is that people have to justify their employment, so they have to do 'something' even if that 'something' does not improve things. The other option they have is to move to another division/project. Moving may not always be an option.
- johnnyfaehell 6y ago
  > Ooh yes is so blatantly obvious that this is just some developers' vanity project that he enthusiastically promoted in order to get his own promotion. To be fair, if it was a project to get promoted it wasn't really a vanity project. If it was a vainty project I suspect they wouldn't have quite half way through. > Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface. From the looks of it, it's just applying Google's design that is everywhere else to Blogger. While for many people here this isn't needed. But we're for the most part considered advanced users of majority of things we use. This seems like a change that would make it easier for people who aren't that computer savy and are used to gmail and the other Google products and want to start blogging.
- lawn 6y ago
  It seems these pointless redesigns that only worsen the experience are everywhere. The Reddit one is another perfect example.
xvyyre 6y ago
Wait, people are still using blogspot?
- toyg 6y ago
  I have a blog there since 2002. I’ve run personal websites before and after, which have long fallen to my laziness for sysadmin tasks. Blogger alwyas works, costs me nothing, doesn’t try too hard, doesn’t go down if traffic surges, and gives me significant google-juice.
- paganel 6y ago
  Yes, I have had my blog in there since 2005, if it isn't broken why should I fix it? Recently I've also started a new personal project which mainly consists in posting a new "article" every few days with 5 to 10 photos attached to it, I've found blogspot a lot more handy to use than doing all that on my linode instance (I hate being in the "image managing" business) or on any other blogging platform. I could have chosen wordpress, but I'm not sure how much "free" hard-disk space they provide by default.
app4soft 6y ago
> Google, nobody asked for a new Blogger interface ... and new Google Sites interface too.[0] [0] https://twitter.com/P_Nezzie/status/1292457186971529217 https://twitter.com/P_Nezzie/status/1292457186971529217
yuhong 6y ago
Off topic, but I posted my essay/overview on Google and DoubleClick on Blogspot for a reason, though I now have a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008_financial_crisis_on_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008... I just switched themes on my Blogspot blog because I posted the ConfigScript.ps1 PowerShell script that MS took down. I used it when I was doing work on CompatTelRunner and Appraiser in Windows.
natch 6y ago
And it puts full justify on comments... eww.
brian_herman 6y ago
It seems like google likes to engineer problems without considering the solution they already have in place. A handful of messaging platforms... etc.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
I just checked out the new UI for creating and editing new blogger articles. It seems OK to me, but I understand the author’s complaints. I have switched 3 or 4 times between using blogger and using a static site generator. This is easy to do because tools like Jekyll easily import blogger data dumps. Moving back from a static generated blog to blogger is a few copy and paste operations. I like having everything in my domain, but using blogger is convenient. Right now, I am using blogger again, but periodically generate a static blog that I also link on my domain as a backup.
djohnston 6y ago
gotta get that promo tho
jagtesh 6y ago
Someone thought of a way to keep their job at Google. Seriously though, I'd love to see some stats on Blogger traffic today and what level of ad revenue it contribute to Google. It's got to be a cash cow for them to keep it running for so long.
hrishios 6y ago
This is google being google. Blogger underwent a refresh maybe about 5 years ago, and that too was trending in this (worse) direction.
SkyLinx 6y ago
Shameless plug: if you just need a simple blog, check out DynaBlogger (https://www.dynablogger.com https://www.dynablogger.com), a new blogging platform I just launched

I'm trying to think of internet brands that have successfully reinvented themselves, like analogous to an alternate universe where Myspace relaunches and becomes a thing. Maybe blogspot is a going concern, but it seems like the Altavista of internet publishing to me. Winner may take all in network effect companies, but does it mean you also only get one shot, or is there a "retro" effect online too? To adapt another adage, users don't leave products, they leave communities. The idea of starting a new blog on blogspot doesn't really register for me anymore. Or maybe I'm out of touch?

pier25 6y ago

I thought Google had completely abandoned Blogger. Is there a reason they are investing in it again?

genericone 6y ago
An ambitious/driven PM was put on the project, and he/she is making more aggressive demands than all the ones in the last 10 years <- opinion
oh_sigh 6y ago
Somebody wanted to get promoted and needed to show "impact". Count your blessings that they didn't decide to show impact by creating yet another google chat app.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  At some point this sort of response to every post with "Google" in the title became akin to responding "First!!" on every post. That point was, frankly, something like a year ago.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    I think you're talking about the second sentence in my post, when really that was just a joke. The main point was that it was probably done by someone looking to show an impact for promotion, which I don't think is a HN meme regarding google, like (n+1 chat apps, google eats your privacy, what will google deprecate next) are.
ma2rten 6y ago
The same reason that some other Google products have been redesigned recently: They used GWT and GWT has been deprecated.
- pier25 6y ago
  When they launched the last Gmail redesign in 2018 I used an extension to check what they had used and it showed up Vue: https://twitter.com/PierB/status/989630991051476992 https://twitter.com/PierB/status/989630991051476992 It doesn't show up anymore so they probably obfuscated it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    Gmail uses Wiz. The extension was probably misclassifying it. https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/958696304149868545 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/958696304149868545
- cromwellian 6y ago
  Non-UI code is able to be compiled with J2CL, which shares GWT's runtime. However, the UI would have to be replaced with Wiz.
- thisistheend123 6y ago
  I have a newbie question. Since blogger is such a stable platform and hasn't seen much change feature wise for sometime now, why does one have to rewrite it if some framework that is uses has been deprecated. Just asking.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Protecting it from security holes in the framework would be one reason. Ensuring somebody in your org still knows how it works and could fix stuff in a pinch, is another.
- 6y ago
mikro2nd 6y ago
Too many UI designers and not enough real work for them to do? Seems to me there's far too much of that sort of thing going on in the software economy (not just UI designers!) -- far too much redeveloping existing wheels (and usually not for the better) and far too little actual advancement of the state of the art, far too little actual innovation.

justicezyx 6y ago

Google engineers wanted impact to get promoted, consider this a natural result (or whatever other rationale that does not put user satisfaction as the first criteria)

dodobirdlord 6y ago
Someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it was updated because it depended on obsolete libraries. Presumably the new libraries made the new design more straightforward to implement than attempting to reproduce the existing one.
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  What, exactly, was "obsolete" about those libraries. Did the code stop executing? Were they written in languages whose compilers/interpreters stopped functioning? Or were there simply newer, shinier toys to play with?
  - coliveira 6y ago
    If it was written in python, it can really stop working. Most companies are transitioning to Python3.
    - coliveira 6y ago
      If you think I'm joking, there are huge companies that have already declared Python2 as non-supported software, so if you have any software written in Python2 you have to either rewrite or stop using it.
  - oblio 6y ago
    Absolutely everything connected to the internet needs to be kept up to date for a simple reason. Security. We're past the 90's when "the code stopped executing" was the only valid reason for an update :-)

8note 6y ago

I imagine you don't have to worry about it for very long; next they'll announce that it's shutting down and that you can use the YouTube community tab instead

istorical 6y ago
they will let you know you have a month to transfer your blog to YouTube community, and at the end of that period if you haven't transitioned (a process whose ramifications in terms of privacy and how it affects your ability to keep separate identities on different platforms are entirely opaque) your entire blog will be deleted and lost forever.

est 6y ago

Ok nobody asked but what about the guy at Blogger team who's role is to make up bullshit OKRs and get promotions?

V-eHGsd_ 6y ago
spoken like someone who remembers the kennedy announcement.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  And for those who may not, the 2011 "Kennedy" UI initiative at Google. https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-h... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620566
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    These kind of announcements probably happen all the time within Apple, why do people rage when someone else tries to fix UI inconsistency in L&F and behavior, but Apple does it by changing what you're use to without asking you, and nary a peep? At least other companies sometimes let you keep the old theme/skin for awhile.
    - V-eHGsd_ 6y ago
      so, this isn't kennedy-specific, but from a mostly outsider's perspective (I worked at google for a long long time, but not on any of this stuff), I think it's motive. apple sells hardware to users & google sells eyeballs to advertisers. the most benign explanation for google's constant UI redesign is that it is, as the GP said, some "guy on blogger team who's role is to make up bullshit OKRs and get promotions". as a user of these products, that pointless churn is incredibly frustrating. The less benign explanation is that it's about increasing my eyeball time for advertisers. as a human being, that's incredibly infuriating; especially when the "redesign" doesn't offer me anything in return (I'm looking at you google music / youtube music)

michaelsitver 6y ago

I'm shocked Blogger made any changes at all. Always assumed they were in maintainance mode. I'm really curious how many people are still on the blogger team at Google.

frouge 6y ago
They had to give them some work

ezoe 6y ago

These days, I am thinking that relying heavily on a particular Blog service has a risk. Those services will be eventually gone. Blogger is no exception. Like all the services Google purchased and abandoned in the past. I don't want to risk losing all the writings I intended to publish on the Internet. But, blogging is not that important enough for me to set up a my very own dedicated web server. So, these days, I'm simply using GitHub Pages for the blog. I realized all I need is to host static HTML files. I can write locally with my favourite text editor, git commit & git push to publish it. No need to use web browser at all. Even if GitHub is gone, I have entire data on my multiple storages I owned and rented. I can do this with other Blog services but I have to automate the web browser operation to copy&paste the writings for each blog services, which is not necessary if I simply use GitHub.

Shared404 6y ago
> But, blogging is not that important enough for me to set up a my very own dedicated web server. If for some reason you wind up wanting to move off of GitHub, I've found Linodes bottom tier to be great for hosting a small static site. You do have to configure the webserver yourself of course, but it's a step down in complexity from self hosting.

dwheeler 6y ago

If you want to be in control, the solution has always been the same: own your own domain, and post there. If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their content, and they're in control of it, not you. No matter what is claimed otherwise. Yes, it's harder. Getting visibility is also harder. It's still the only solution if you want to be in control. It's okay to pay someone to run the blogging platform, etc., as long as you own the domain name & can decide what it points to. You can then switch providers, switch systems you use, or whatever you want to do. But if you don't control the domain name, someone else is in control.

quickthrower2 6y ago
Good advice, but this rant is about the tool not the domain ownership though. You can own your own domain and use Wordpress self-hosted, then find they updated the UI constantly as you upgrade it keep it up to date for - you know - security. The only way to get the level of control long term is probably sadly a static site generation kind of a thing. There was a HN post about "software that is no longer changed but still used" as I am paraphrasing and this is an interesting idea. A GUI blogging platform that ends it's life and stays as-is forever would be cool, even if it lack funky features, maybe you enter the HTML yourself.
- dwheeler 6y ago
  I agree, you can own your own domain name without having to do everything yourself. Like anything else, if you don't want to do something, hire somebody else to do it. I own my own domain name, and then pay others to take care of my website. I chose a cheap one for now. If I don't like their service, I can move my content somewhere else in the future. I could even have it hosted for free on GitHub, if I'm willing to live with him there constraints on static servers. But I own the domain name, so no one can just take it down without any recourse. If someone decides to stop providing me a service, I can just take my stuff somewhere else. Of course, you have to have a backup of the data, and use tools that are available elsewhere. But that really isn't that difficult. Static sites are really easy to manage this way. If you want something beyond the static site, it's not hard to use tools like WordPress which are open source software and widely available elsewhere. (Be cautious about adding plugins to Wordpress, some of them are security disasters, but at least you get to choose what you use.)

LordAtlas 6y ago

Rather ironic that the post mentions things like accessibility while using a blog layout that is not responsive on mobiles, and looks like crap with tiny, unreadable text on large screens.

troyjfarrell 6y ago

Sandstorm has accidentally solved the problem of rapid change by not having enough developers to continually update the available applications, which include Wordpress. You can also ignore updates. Thankfully, the architecture of Sandstorm turns many types of vulnerabilities in the installed applications into non-events. This means that the lack of updates is not so alarming. https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-non-events/#wordpress https://docs.sandstorm.io/en/latest/using/security-non-event...

Santosh83 6y ago
Good to hear Sandstorm is still alive! It is precisely the kind of thing that has some chance of making self hosted popular among the wider public, instead of ever shrinking patches maintained by die-hard enthusiasts inside a sea of corporate silos.

charliebrownau 6y ago

Check out free speech blog platform - Publish0x

susam 6y ago

> I'm probably the last person on earth to do so, but I write my posts in raw HTML. Although I don't use Blogger/Blogspot anymore and I render my blog using a static site generator [1], I too write my posts in raw HTML [2]. In the past, the differences in how various tools interpret and render some of the corner case scenarios like nested lists, code blocks or blockquotes nested within lists, etc. caused issues in porting my Markdown files from one system to another. Granted, there is CommonMark now and I think it is a pretty good specification but it is not a standard like HTML5 is. I prefer standards, so that I know with a reasonable degree of confidence that what I write now would look the same 10 years from now. [1]: https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite (Disclosure: My wife developed this project) [2]: https://github.com/susam/susam.in/tree/master/content/blog https://github.com/susam/susam.in/tree/master/content/blog

cblconfederate 6y ago

Ooh yes is so blatantly obvious that this is some developers' vanity project that he enthusiastically promoted in order to get his own promotion. Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface. Great developers like this should stay in google forever. Similar thing with paypal's redesign

tspike 6y ago
> just some developers' vanity project I think you underestimate the number of people involved in these kinds of projects.. guarantee there were multiple product managers, a host of UX designers, engineering managers, and devs. It's much harder for a developer to get a thing like this through than a product person.
- srean 6y ago
  A problem is that people have to justify their employment, so they have to do 'something' even if that 'something' does not improve things. The other option they have is to move to another division/project. Moving may not always be an option.
johnnyfaehell 6y ago
> Ooh yes is so blatantly obvious that this is just some developers' vanity project that he enthusiastically promoted in order to get his own promotion. To be fair, if it was a project to get promoted it wasn't really a vanity project. If it was a vainty project I suspect they wouldn't have quite half way through. > Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface. From the looks of it, it's just applying Google's design that is everywhere else to Blogger. While for many people here this isn't needed. But we're for the most part considered advanced users of majority of things we use. This seems like a change that would make it easier for people who aren't that computer savy and are used to gmail and the other Google products and want to start blogging.
lawn 6y ago
It seems these pointless redesigns that only worsen the experience are everywhere. The Reddit one is another perfect example.

xvyyre 6y ago

Wait, people are still using blogspot?

toyg 6y ago
I have a blog there since 2002. I’ve run personal websites before and after, which have long fallen to my laziness for sysadmin tasks. Blogger alwyas works, costs me nothing, doesn’t try too hard, doesn’t go down if traffic surges, and gives me significant google-juice.
paganel 6y ago
Yes, I have had my blog in there since 2005, if it isn't broken why should I fix it? Recently I've also started a new personal project which mainly consists in posting a new "article" every few days with 5 to 10 photos attached to it, I've found blogspot a lot more handy to use than doing all that on my linode instance (I hate being in the "image managing" business) or on any other blogging platform. I could have chosen wordpress, but I'm not sure how much "free" hard-disk space they provide by default.

app4soft 6y ago

> Google, nobody asked for a new Blogger interface ... and new Google Sites interface too.[0] [0] https://twitter.com/P_Nezzie/status/1292457186971529217 https://twitter.com/P_Nezzie/status/1292457186971529217

yuhong 6y ago

Off topic, but I posted my essay/overview on Google and DoubleClick on Blogspot for a reason, though I now have a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008_financial_crisis_on_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008... I just switched themes on my Blogspot blog because I posted the ConfigScript.ps1 PowerShell script that MS took down. I used it when I was doing work on CompatTelRunner and Appraiser in Windows.

natch 6y ago

And it puts full justify on comments... eww.

brian_herman 6y ago

It seems like google likes to engineer problems without considering the solution they already have in place. A handful of messaging platforms... etc.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

I just checked out the new UI for creating and editing new blogger articles. It seems OK to me, but I understand the author’s complaints. I have switched 3 or 4 times between using blogger and using a static site generator. This is easy to do because tools like Jekyll easily import blogger data dumps. Moving back from a static generated blog to blogger is a few copy and paste operations. I like having everything in my domain, but using blogger is convenient. Right now, I am using blogger again, but periodically generate a static blog that I also link on my domain as a backup.

djohnston 6y ago

gotta get that promo tho

jagtesh 6y ago

Someone thought of a way to keep their job at Google. Seriously though, I'd love to see some stats on Blogger traffic today and what level of ad revenue it contribute to Google. It's got to be a cash cow for them to keep it running for so long.

hrishios 6y ago

This is google being google. Blogger underwent a refresh maybe about 5 years ago, and that too was trending in this (worse) direction.

SkyLinx 6y ago

Shameless plug: if you just need a simple blog, check out DynaBlogger (https://www.dynablogger.com https://www.dynablogger.com), a new blogging platform I just launched