My Experience With The New Blogger Backend...
Last year, Blogger began rolling out a new interface for maintaining blogs on the Blogger platform. The new interface has a clean and supposedly phone-friendly design featuring more white space and larger buttons for fat-fingered usage. However, under the hood, there were some rather surprising changes. The Blogger team made a formal announcement of the change on the Blogger Buzz blog:
The rendering of HTML took a decidedly unwelcome turn when Blogger users discovered that certain HTML tags would be stripped out automatically. For users that rely on third-party apps to make formatted posts like those who post recipe cards on their blogs, it was particularly unpleasant to have their recipes trashed automatically. In my case, I had used custom HTML attributes to display appropriate ribbons on the snippets on the home page. Imagine my surprise when I found that my hard work was now broken. If I wanted your unhelpful editor to remove what I typed in the editor, I wouldn't have put it there in the first place. Four months after the launch of the new Blogger editor, Google Employee, Marc noted that the issue had been fixed:
Another nagging issue is with line breaks. In former Blogger interface, when you pressed ENTER, this action equated to a line break tag in the HTML (<br />). In the new Blogger interface, pressing ENTER, renders something altogether different in HTML (<div><br /></div>). In addition, blocks of text my be surrounded by paragraph tags (<p>...</p>). This isn't necessarily a bad thing all by itself, but, when compounded by eccentricities in the way the Blogger editor handles editing and re-editing posts, it's easy for these paragraph and div containers to get out of hand and end up all over the affected post. Occasionally, a post will become so corrupted with misplaced div and paragraph tags that users will have to remove all formatting and reapply the line breaks to resolve the issue. Users that want a taste of the former Blogger editor experience must remember to use SHIFT+ENTER. Google Employee, Marc explained the change:
The new Blogger editor is much stricter with its interpretation of HTML than in the former Blogger editor. This means that when there are HTML formatting issues, the new editor is more likely to report these issues. The former Blogger editor would identify a specific HTML issue with a helpful hint such as missing closing div and even offer to fix the issue by automatically adding a closing div tag. While, the new Blogger editor does still advise when there is an HTML issue, it doesn't provide hints and doesn't actually fix issues with the HTML. I really miss the hints. It's really a pain to try an identify these types of problems without hints.
Blogger did add a new feature to help users to create tables. That's always been an issue with former Blogger and it was nice to see the new feature in new Blogger, but, it became evident fairly quickly, that some of the new features introduced in new Blogger were not quite ready for public consumption. Almost as quickly as it came, the new table creating feature went away.
Blogger also revamped the image insert tool, but, all too soon, it became clear that the new image insert tool had some issues. Former Blogger had established a set of image sizes and a specific format for the underlying image HTML, but, in new Blogger, the image sizes and the underlying image HTML were both arbitrarily changed. In addition, the new interface, was a bit flakey in that sometimes users would not be able to reach their photo archives and other users couldn't actually make selections because of script errors or improper placement of overlays. The latter is a situation where the selection box cannot be clicked because another box is sitting on top. Since the rollout of the new image insert tool, Blogger has rolled back some of the changes and the current implementation of the image insert tool, which is partly new and partly legacy, seems fairly stable.
Blogger changed the handling of dates in the editor. Many users would publish a post and then change the date after publication as a way to keep the post on top like a sticky post on a forum or bulletin board. In former Blogger, it was possible to change the date of a published post without changing the post's URL. In the new Blogger, users were expected to unpublish a post, make the date change and then republish the post. This had negative consequences for comments associated with the given post as well as breaking links to the given post. Blogger has since, softened its position on post dates.
One of the more unsettling changes came to the Post Viewer when users discovered that pagination was no longer available. Users like myself, with hundreds of posts and some other users with thousands of posts found it maddeningly frustrating to have to scroll through all the old posts just to edit one at the bottom of the list. And, if you had to edit more than one old post, after spending an inordinate amount of time scrolling through old posts, users would have to repeat the process again and again and again for each subsequent post. I had to do this over a hundred times to work around other issues with the new Blogger editor. Not fun. Since the launch of the new Post Viewer, Blogger has responded with better search tools and a mechanism to jump to a specific post by number.
The Blogger Theme menu received a major update. Many of the various settings in the Theme menu are hidden away in the advanced submenu and further obscured by a drop-down menu. So, with just a tiny triangle to indicate that there are additional items, it was easy for users to become confused about where to find commonly used theme settings. Blogger seemed to choose to change the user interface in ways that made it less user-friendly. For instance, in the former Blogger Theme submenu for the post header, a user could either select from a list of options for the font size or enter a custom value, but, in the new Blogger, the user has only a text box and no list of default values to choose for the font size. So, in my humble opinion, the new user experience in the Blogger Theme menu seems like a step backwards.
On the positive side, Blogger did listen to its user base and did actively address many of the more annoying issues with the rollout of the initial version of the new Blogger backend, so, today, as of this writing, the new interface still has some issues, but, it is, at least in my experience, fairly stable and, although it needs a bit of coaxing, I can still format my posts the way I would like. Another positive thing that came from the update is the ability to preview posts in different screen sizes to see how a page might respond to either a wide screen desktop as opposed to a cell phone on portrait mode.
That being said, I've just spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with a rather unexpected change to the Blogger backend. In a previous iteration of the new Blogger backend, post snippets would be stripped of most, but, not all HTML. I had relied on this quirk to pass data from the posts to the post snippets in certain HTNL tags like bold and italics that would be retained in the post snippets. This quirk was actually a double-edged sword for Blogger because, users that had copied and pasted text from third-party apps into their Blogger editor would often complain about snippets that were missing text. This is because the text contained hidden formatting that counted against the snippet text limit, leaving the affected users with no actual snippet text. It seems that Blogger has finally removed that quirk entirely, but, it sucks to be me in that I now I cannot rely on this quirk. Doh!
Then, once I thought I had the site back up and running, I checked a handful of posts and discovered, much to my dismay, that almost none of my custom code was working. There were no error messages, so, on a hunch I decided to revert from the Essential Theme to the Contempo Theme and sure enough, everything came back to life. The Essential Theme and the Contempo Theme were, at one time, very similar under the hood, but, now it seems that they are less similar, at least on the post level than they once were. I'm not exactly sure what changed in the inner-workings of the Essential Theme. I suspect that it might be something simple like a renamed container div or a reordering of nested container divs that threw off my custom code because, to avoid hard errors, I check for the existence of specific container divs and that specific container divs occur in a certain order. With the spate of recent issues, it's taken about three days, but, I've finally got the site back to normal. Yay!
I was an early adopter of the new Blogger backend and I have to say that while it has a nice white aesthetic, the new Blogger backend left quite a bit to be desired at its initial launch. Since then, Blogger has made some significant progress in addressing some of the issues with the new Blogger backend. It is a work in progress and the new Blogger backend is still being tweaked behind the scenes. I do sorely miss the weekly status updates from the Blogger team. Overall, I would give the new Blogger backend a 3 out of 5.
I leave you with news from the battle of M-OEE8 courtesy of Eve Online...
We'll be moving everyone to the new interface over the coming months. Starting in late June, many Blogger creators will see the new interface become their default, though they can revert to the old interface by clicking Revert to legacy Blogger in the left-hand navigation. By late July, creators will no longer be able to revert to the legacy Blogger interface.
The rendering of HTML took a decidedly unwelcome turn when Blogger users discovered that certain HTML tags would be stripped out automatically. For users that rely on third-party apps to make formatted posts like those who post recipe cards on their blogs, it was particularly unpleasant to have their recipes trashed automatically. In my case, I had used custom HTML attributes to display appropriate ribbons on the snippets on the home page. Imagine my surprise when I found that my hard work was now broken. If I wanted your unhelpful editor to remove what I typed in the editor, I wouldn't have put it there in the first place. Four months after the launch of the new Blogger editor, Google Employee, Marc noted that the issue had been fixed:
Missing attributes: We’ve corrected a bug that discarded some attributes (such as itemprop) while in Compose mode.
Another nagging issue is with line breaks. In former Blogger interface, when you pressed ENTER, this action equated to a line break tag in the HTML (<br />). In the new Blogger interface, pressing ENTER, renders something altogether different in HTML (<div><br /></div>). In addition, blocks of text my be surrounded by paragraph tags (<p>...</p>). This isn't necessarily a bad thing all by itself, but, when compounded by eccentricities in the way the Blogger editor handles editing and re-editing posts, it's easy for these paragraph and div containers to get out of hand and end up all over the affected post. Occasionally, a post will become so corrupted with misplaced div and paragraph tags that users will have to remove all formatting and reapply the line breaks to resolve the issue. Users that want a taste of the former Blogger editor experience must remember to use SHIFT+ENTER. Google Employee, Marc explained the change:
The new Blogger editor is much stricter with its interpretation of HTML than in the former Blogger editor. This means that when there are HTML formatting issues, the new editor is more likely to report these issues. The former Blogger editor would identify a specific HTML issue with a helpful hint such as missing closing div and even offer to fix the issue by automatically adding a closing div tag. While, the new Blogger editor does still advise when there is an HTML issue, it doesn't provide hints and doesn't actually fix issues with the HTML. I really miss the hints. It's really a pain to try an identify these types of problems without hints.
Blogger did add a new feature to help users to create tables. That's always been an issue with former Blogger and it was nice to see the new feature in new Blogger, but, it became evident fairly quickly, that some of the new features introduced in new Blogger were not quite ready for public consumption. Almost as quickly as it came, the new table creating feature went away.
Blogger also revamped the image insert tool, but, all too soon, it became clear that the new image insert tool had some issues. Former Blogger had established a set of image sizes and a specific format for the underlying image HTML, but, in new Blogger, the image sizes and the underlying image HTML were both arbitrarily changed. In addition, the new interface, was a bit flakey in that sometimes users would not be able to reach their photo archives and other users couldn't actually make selections because of script errors or improper placement of overlays. The latter is a situation where the selection box cannot be clicked because another box is sitting on top. Since the rollout of the new image insert tool, Blogger has rolled back some of the changes and the current implementation of the image insert tool, which is partly new and partly legacy, seems fairly stable.
Blogger changed the handling of dates in the editor. Many users would publish a post and then change the date after publication as a way to keep the post on top like a sticky post on a forum or bulletin board. In former Blogger, it was possible to change the date of a published post without changing the post's URL. In the new Blogger, users were expected to unpublish a post, make the date change and then republish the post. This had negative consequences for comments associated with the given post as well as breaking links to the given post. Blogger has since, softened its position on post dates.
One of the more unsettling changes came to the Post Viewer when users discovered that pagination was no longer available. Users like myself, with hundreds of posts and some other users with thousands of posts found it maddeningly frustrating to have to scroll through all the old posts just to edit one at the bottom of the list. And, if you had to edit more than one old post, after spending an inordinate amount of time scrolling through old posts, users would have to repeat the process again and again and again for each subsequent post. I had to do this over a hundred times to work around other issues with the new Blogger editor. Not fun. Since the launch of the new Post Viewer, Blogger has responded with better search tools and a mechanism to jump to a specific post by number.
The Blogger Theme menu received a major update. Many of the various settings in the Theme menu are hidden away in the advanced submenu and further obscured by a drop-down menu. So, with just a tiny triangle to indicate that there are additional items, it was easy for users to become confused about where to find commonly used theme settings. Blogger seemed to choose to change the user interface in ways that made it less user-friendly. For instance, in the former Blogger Theme submenu for the post header, a user could either select from a list of options for the font size or enter a custom value, but, in the new Blogger, the user has only a text box and no list of default values to choose for the font size. So, in my humble opinion, the new user experience in the Blogger Theme menu seems like a step backwards.
On the positive side, Blogger did listen to its user base and did actively address many of the more annoying issues with the rollout of the initial version of the new Blogger backend, so, today, as of this writing, the new interface still has some issues, but, it is, at least in my experience, fairly stable and, although it needs a bit of coaxing, I can still format my posts the way I would like. Another positive thing that came from the update is the ability to preview posts in different screen sizes to see how a page might respond to either a wide screen desktop as opposed to a cell phone on portrait mode.
That being said, I've just spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with a rather unexpected change to the Blogger backend. In a previous iteration of the new Blogger backend, post snippets would be stripped of most, but, not all HTML. I had relied on this quirk to pass data from the posts to the post snippets in certain HTNL tags like bold and italics that would be retained in the post snippets. This quirk was actually a double-edged sword for Blogger because, users that had copied and pasted text from third-party apps into their Blogger editor would often complain about snippets that were missing text. This is because the text contained hidden formatting that counted against the snippet text limit, leaving the affected users with no actual snippet text. It seems that Blogger has finally removed that quirk entirely, but, it sucks to be me in that I now I cannot rely on this quirk. Doh!
Then, once I thought I had the site back up and running, I checked a handful of posts and discovered, much to my dismay, that almost none of my custom code was working. There were no error messages, so, on a hunch I decided to revert from the Essential Theme to the Contempo Theme and sure enough, everything came back to life. The Essential Theme and the Contempo Theme were, at one time, very similar under the hood, but, now it seems that they are less similar, at least on the post level than they once were. I'm not exactly sure what changed in the inner-workings of the Essential Theme. I suspect that it might be something simple like a renamed container div or a reordering of nested container divs that threw off my custom code because, to avoid hard errors, I check for the existence of specific container divs and that specific container divs occur in a certain order. With the spate of recent issues, it's taken about three days, but, I've finally got the site back to normal. Yay!
I was an early adopter of the new Blogger backend and I have to say that while it has a nice white aesthetic, the new Blogger backend left quite a bit to be desired at its initial launch. Since then, Blogger has made some significant progress in addressing some of the issues with the new Blogger backend. It is a work in progress and the new Blogger backend is still being tweaked behind the scenes. I do sorely miss the weekly status updates from the Blogger team. Overall, I would give the new Blogger backend a 3 out of 5.I leave you with news from the battle of M-OEE8 courtesy of Eve Online...
