8 ms·

Blogger has bad UX and it annoys me

68 points by MrJagil 5y ago

warglebargle 5y ago
Being mad about auto-save is kind of wild… is it their implementation that’s the problem? A save button seems like one of software’s biggest anachronisms. Under what conditions would someone prefer an unsaved file on the precipice?
ethor 5y ago
Is blogging still a thing in 2021?
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  Yes
- robjan 5y ago
  Probably half of the posts on HN are blogs
  - execat 5y ago
    Very few are Blogger blogs though, which is what the article is about.
    - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      Blogger fell out of favor years ago after a redesign confronted everyone with a loading screen before showing the content, because for some reason some overzealous developers decided that web apps are the future, even if blogs are statically generated content. Searching on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374 comes up for example. Google will pull the plug on Blogger at some point.
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  SubStack is now the new rage. SubStack is just blogging with added mailing lists and payments.
  - powerlogic31 5y ago
    products are much more than just their features. Substack have a great narrative..
addicted 5y ago
Isn’t the issue here that Google has basically abandoned Blogger?
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  They did a redesign of the writing interface about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    They did. And it's so bloody terrible, in terms of UI and basic "text appearing when you type" performance (load up a bunch of photos in a post and it lags exceedingly badly) that I moved my blog entirely off Blogger. I've got some video of how badly broken the new interface is, in terms of "actually letting you write blog entries" in my post here. It went from perfectly fine to "literally unusable on the hardware I tended to write on, with a typical number of photos in a post." https://www.sevarg.net/2020/10/10/end-of-blog-new-blogger-interface-is/ https://www.sevarg.net/2020/10/10/end-of-blog-new-blogger-in...
swiley 5y ago
People who think it's ok to overload multitouch gestures should be shot. On iOS you have: 1) One finger swipe (scroll) 2) One finger swipe (forward/backward history navigation) 3) One finger swipe (forward/backward post navigation) Desktop Firefox on Xorg has better UX on a touchscreen than this bullshit.
MatekCopatek 5y ago
> Trying to be helpful by automatically doing stuff I don't necessarily want. Wholeheartedly agree. My #1 personal pet peeve that fits this description is links that automatically open in new windows/tabs. You might (correctly) assume that most people want to open certain links (e.g. document previews) in a new tab, but that doesn't mean you need to force it upon them. Let them decide if they want to click with the left or the middle button. Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"?
- skhr0680 5y ago
  > Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"? Sample of one, but yes
- josefresco 5y ago
  > Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"? Facebook does this. Their links open in the same window, but nuke the back history. I've clicked a FB link multiple times and then tried to go back and was justifiably confused (at first) and then upset (every time after).
  - egeozcan 5y ago
    Are you using FB container in Firefox? This would be a known side-effect.
    - josefresco 5y ago
      That must be it! Now that I know it's Firefox protecting me, and not Facebook trying to trap me, I'm thrilled! Although from a UI perspective that should have been more obvious to me.
  - 5y ago
inside6 5y ago
Pretty sure it has a bad UX on purpose, they want to get people off the platform so they can shut it down.
hsn915 5y ago
I find it so strange that blogging is such a simple problem to solve but there's really no service that does it nicely. There was a while when everyone was basing their company's official blog on Tumblr! The space is so bad people were using Tumblr for their official company blog!! Then came Medium and for a while people rejoiced but then it turned into an annoying website. Yea there are "many" blogging services but each one lacks some important things that make them "meh". - You need to have a commenting system. A blog that is just a set of static pages is not so interesting. I suppose the hard part here is fighting spam? - You must support non-latin languages. Sometimes I blog in Arabic and I want RTL support on my blog. - You need an RSS feed and email subscriptions. Let people build up their audience. - You need to support multimedia (images, movies, audio ..) - You need to support input by several languages (markdown, html, wysiwyg) - You need a set of decent looking themes and have them be somewhat customizable - You need to be easy to setup! If you're a hosted service, this is often a non-issue, but if you're a "you host your own blog" you need to provide something better than "here's the source, now install these twenty different development tools and run all these commands here and there and edit these fifteen config files so you can build and configure your blog". - You need to provide the user with a way to easily get all their content so they can switch away from your platform. If the data is in a special format you should provide them the tools necessary to export to various other formats (html, pdf, etc..)
- Veen 5y ago
  WordPress has all of those things. It's fairly easy to set-up and it's secure if you update it every once in a while.
  - hsn915 5y ago
    Does it let you post content in markdown? This is important because to me a blog is just a place to publish my writings. I must be able to write somewhere else in my preferred format and just use the blog to publish it. As far as I can tell, wordpress only lets you write in their own wysiwyg editor, or plain html. Nothing else. So if I want to publish to it in markdown, I have to first export markdown to html separately.
HermanMartinus 5y ago
I'd recommend Bear Blog if you're looking for a super minimal blog that just works.
okareaman 5y ago
I'm getting old. I've been thinking about where I would blog if I wanted it to last 50 years after I'm gone.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
There's an obvious solution to this: don't treat websites like programs, and never trust sites. I learned this lesson over a decade ago. After being burned over and over because some shitty browser or site bug ate my post I now use One Weird Trick on every post I write: 1. Write it. 2. Select it and Ctrl+C it. 3. Post it. If the post gets eaten, the text is safe in the clipboard, waiting for another go. This is for shorter posts. For longer ones, multi-paragraph stuff considered over hours or days, it lives in Notepad until it's ready to post. NEVER compose anything in a webpage form. They just can't be trusted.
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
If you're looking for a modern/minimal blogging alternative, you can check out what I built: https://www.wndr.xyz/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/what-s-art-and-what-s-not https://www.wndr.xyz/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/what-s-a...
- blorbe 5y ago
  Not related, but how long do you plan to keep your xyz domain for? I just found out that they apparently last for 10 years max and I don't know what to do with mine anymore. There's so little info about that age limit on the Internet that I can't figure out if there's even a way to get around it.
  - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    I was never informed of an age limit. It's not really a problem for me, since I bought the domain dirt cheap. Do you have a source for the 10 year limit?
    - blorbe 5y ago
      Sorry I actually think I got thrown off by some poor wording in a NameSilo email. After searching I think the actual restriction is that the domain can't last for more than 10 years after the last time you paid (but you're free to keep moving your 10-year window by continuing to pay) which is way more like what you'd expect. My bad if I alarmed you! I was super confused myself and I was wondering why that supposed limit wasn't more well known lol.

68 points by MrJagil 5y ago

Being mad about auto-save is kind of wild… is it their implementation that’s the problem? A save button seems like one of software’s biggest anachronisms. Under what conditions would someone prefer an unsaved file on the precipice?

ethor 5y ago

Is blogging still a thing in 2021?

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
Yes
robjan 5y ago
Probably half of the posts on HN are blogs
- execat 5y ago
  Very few are Blogger blogs though, which is what the article is about.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Blogger fell out of favor years ago after a redesign confronted everyone with a loading screen before showing the content, because for some reason some overzealous developers decided that web apps are the future, even if blogs are statically generated content. Searching on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374 comes up for example. Google will pull the plug on Blogger at some point.
shp0ngle 5y ago
SubStack is now the new rage. SubStack is just blogging with added mailing lists and payments.
- powerlogic31 5y ago
  products are much more than just their features. Substack have a great narrative..

addicted 5y ago

Isn’t the issue here that Google has basically abandoned Blogger?

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
They did a redesign of the writing interface about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374
- Syonyk 5y ago
  They did. And it's so bloody terrible, in terms of UI and basic "text appearing when you type" performance (load up a bunch of photos in a post and it lags exceedingly badly) that I moved my blog entirely off Blogger. I've got some video of how badly broken the new interface is, in terms of "actually letting you write blog entries" in my post here. It went from perfectly fine to "literally unusable on the hardware I tended to write on, with a typical number of photos in a post." https://www.sevarg.net/2020/10/10/end-of-blog-new-blogger-interface-is/ https://www.sevarg.net/2020/10/10/end-of-blog-new-blogger-in...

swiley 5y ago

People who think it's ok to overload multitouch gestures should be shot. On iOS you have: 1) One finger swipe (scroll) 2) One finger swipe (forward/backward history navigation) 3) One finger swipe (forward/backward post navigation) Desktop Firefox on Xorg has better UX on a touchscreen than this bullshit.

MatekCopatek 5y ago

> Trying to be helpful by automatically doing stuff I don't necessarily want. Wholeheartedly agree. My #1 personal pet peeve that fits this description is links that automatically open in new windows/tabs. You might (correctly) assume that most people want to open certain links (e.g. document previews) in a new tab, but that doesn't mean you need to force it upon them. Let them decide if they want to click with the left or the middle button. Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"?

skhr0680 5y ago
> Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"? Sample of one, but yes
josefresco 5y ago
> Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"? Facebook does this. Their links open in the same window, but nuke the back history. I've clicked a FB link multiple times and then tried to go back and was justifiably confused (at first) and then upset (every time after).
- egeozcan 5y ago
  Are you using FB container in Firefox? This would be a known side-effect.
  - josefresco 5y ago
    That must be it! Now that I know it's Firefox protecting me, and not Facebook trying to trap me, I'm thrilled! Although from a UI perspective that should have been more obvious to me.
- 5y ago

inside6 5y ago

Pretty sure it has a bad UX on purpose, they want to get people off the platform so they can shut it down.

hsn915 5y ago

I find it so strange that blogging is such a simple problem to solve but there's really no service that does it nicely. There was a while when everyone was basing their company's official blog on Tumblr! The space is so bad people were using Tumblr for their official company blog!! Then came Medium and for a while people rejoiced but then it turned into an annoying website. Yea there are "many" blogging services but each one lacks some important things that make them "meh". - You need to have a commenting system. A blog that is just a set of static pages is not so interesting. I suppose the hard part here is fighting spam? - You must support non-latin languages. Sometimes I blog in Arabic and I want RTL support on my blog. - You need an RSS feed and email subscriptions. Let people build up their audience. - You need to support multimedia (images, movies, audio ..) - You need to support input by several languages (markdown, html, wysiwyg) - You need a set of decent looking themes and have them be somewhat customizable - You need to be easy to setup! If you're a hosted service, this is often a non-issue, but if you're a "you host your own blog" you need to provide something better than "here's the source, now install these twenty different development tools and run all these commands here and there and edit these fifteen config files so you can build and configure your blog". - You need to provide the user with a way to easily get all their content so they can switch away from your platform. If the data is in a special format you should provide them the tools necessary to export to various other formats (html, pdf, etc..)

Veen 5y ago
WordPress has all of those things. It's fairly easy to set-up and it's secure if you update it every once in a while.
- hsn915 5y ago
  Does it let you post content in markdown? This is important because to me a blog is just a place to publish my writings. I must be able to write somewhere else in my preferred format and just use the blog to publish it. As far as I can tell, wordpress only lets you write in their own wysiwyg editor, or plain html. Nothing else. So if I want to publish to it in markdown, I have to first export markdown to html separately.

HermanMartinus 5y ago

I'd recommend Bear Blog if you're looking for a super minimal blog that just works.

okareaman 5y ago

I'm getting old. I've been thinking about where I would blog if I wanted it to last 50 years after I'm gone.

ergot_vacation 5y ago

There's an obvious solution to this: don't treat websites like programs, and never trust sites. I learned this lesson over a decade ago. After being burned over and over because some shitty browser or site bug ate my post I now use One Weird Trick on every post I write: 1. Write it. 2. Select it and Ctrl+C it. 3. Post it. If the post gets eaten, the text is safe in the clipboard, waiting for another go. This is for shorter posts. For longer ones, multi-paragraph stuff considered over hours or days, it lives in Notepad until it's ready to post. NEVER compose anything in a webpage form. They just can't be trusted.

TheRealNGenius 5y ago

If you're looking for a modern/minimal blogging alternative, you can check out what I built: https://www.wndr.xyz/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/what-s-art-and-what-s-not https://www.wndr.xyz/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/what-s-a...

blorbe 5y ago
Not related, but how long do you plan to keep your xyz domain for? I just found out that they apparently last for 10 years max and I don't know what to do with mine anymore. There's so little info about that age limit on the Internet that I can't figure out if there's even a way to get around it.
- TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  I was never informed of an age limit. It's not really a problem for me, since I bought the domain dirt cheap. Do you have a source for the 10 year limit?
  - blorbe 5y ago
    Sorry I actually think I got thrown off by some poor wording in a NameSilo email. After searching I think the actual restriction is that the domain can't last for more than 10 years after the last time you paid (but you're free to keep moving your 10-year window by continuing to pay) which is way more like what you'd expect. My bad if I alarmed you! I was super confused myself and I was wondering why that supposed limit wasn't more well known lol.