Tuesday 14 April, 2009

I want a "good" editor to create blogs

It's been happening for quite a while.

Blogger's post editor has been playing games with me. Especially on my GATE solutions blog, where I like to keep things in a uniform format (dunno why, but it feels good to have similar formatting for similar posts - and all the posts there are similar to one another :) )

I do a 'blockquote' (that's the double quotes icon in the Compose mode), type something, want to get out of the blockquote mode for the next line, it un-blockquotes all the previous lines too. What the heck?

I select some text to delete it, Blogger decides I want to delete some surrounding text also and 'helpfully' deletes. Just for testing, I tried deleting 'Blogger' in the previous line, it deleted 'decides' along with it. What on earth can be the logic behind such a thing?

And the biggest fail here is that, when I try to undo that stupid deletion to restore order, it undoes more than I asked for and deletes some things I typed! Seriously, what did they think they were doing when they added this 'feature'? Now, just because I wanted to delete something, I have two options - either not do an undo and retype the things near the place I deleted, or do the undo and retype the things I typed recently. What if what I did not remember what I had typed there? I have to juggle back and forth between undo and redo to see what I typed myself, and retype it myself! That's really... Worse Than Failure on Blogger's part.

With all that frustration out of me, what I wanted to say was, I need a new editor to create my blog posts or I think I'll stop blogging from the mere frustration of dealing with this. Don't worry, I don't think the situation is so bad I won't be able to get any editor to do the job. :)

First, I remembered Microsoft Word itself has a 'Post to Blogger' option, so I tried it. Well, what can I say? The HTML it created was, to put it bluntly, horrible! I'd have been somewhat ok with that if not for the next fact: when I clicked publish to blogger (or something similar), it told me my username and password would be sent in plaintext and anyone can read them. What? This huge program doesn't have a small place for incuding some SSL agent to do encrypted transmissions? I sure ain't giving my Google username and password in the wild like that.

There's also a Blogger for Word add-in to Word that probably handles things more securely, but it's development has been discontinued by Google, and what they give for download doesn't work for me in Word 2007.

Thinking there should be some solution for it, I searched throughout the Internets, only ending up reading things like this which told me some things about Blogger's WYSIWIG editor worked. Not really what I was looking for, but I learnt something. :)

So, the option I'm looking at currently is, creating the posts in the Kompozer or some similar editor, copying the resulting HTML here and posting. Quite a lot of work for such a simple task, but it seems there's no other option. Also, Kompozer doesn't seem to have easy buttons for things such as blockquotes, etc. like Blogger's interface, which makes things a bit more difficult. But in a few days' time, I think I'll be ok with anything to get off this annoying editor.

So, kind reader, if thou knowest of any editor which can my life more pleasant, kindly bestow thy blessings on poor me and reveal its name. I shall be indebted a lot to thou. Thanks. :)

5 comments:

SSN said...

Did you send any feedback to the Blogspot guys?

Sundar said...

No, because:
1. either the problem is a widespread one - then I'd be the nth person to complaint about it to them (there're people much less patient than me), and probably won't get a response; these days, Google is becoming well known for not responding to user comments.
2. or I have been jinxed and the problem occurs only to me, in which case there's no use complaining to them.
Though, case 2 is only a hypothetical case because, I don't believe this would magically occur only to me in every blog I write, in every computer and browser I use (both at home and college), and still not occur to others.
So, the conclusion is, I am probably lazy in a strange way - I'd rather sit and write a long post and then switch to a different editor, than try contacting the Blogger team. :P
And anyway, switching to a full fledged HTML editor is always better, this only gave me a good reason to do that.

Unknown said...

and how about tests such as "9999"???

Varunkumar Nagarajan said...

Check out LiveWriter -- http://varunkumar-n.blogspot.com/2009/12/live-writer-best-offline-blog-editor.html

Sundar said...

@Varun: Yes anna, after writing that post, I searched and found Windows Live Writer to be the best editor out there. I use Live Writer whenever I blog from my laptop. The only problem is I can't use it from work. Though perhaps, that's really a good thing. :)

@big_buka: Did you mean to comment on this post? In that case, it will work in those cases also, as I've explained in that post.