Sunday, July 17, 2011

This is a test

Blogger is rolling out a new GUI, and it has...issues. The ones I spotted a week ago are unsurprisingly still there, but I figured I may as well start taking it out for shakedown cruises to see just how messed up things can get.

Let's see. One of my upcoming posts is going to be a new entry in The Stained Glass Project. Right off the bat I don't see an easy way to open my blog so I can turn the words "The Stained Glass Project" into a hyperlink to all the other entries bearing that label. Let's see what right-clicking on the name of my blog in the upper left does...

Nope, takes me to another page, but this one has a "View blog" button at the top. Why doesn't the Post Editor have one?

Hmmm: also, in "Compose" mode, I'm in a scroll box with about eight lines of text. Two-thirds of the screen is unused real estate. Why?

OK, just switched over to HTML mode. Full screen to play with. Now, let's see about that link to The Stained Glass Project.

OK, back to Compose mode. Trying to do a hypertext link in HTML gives me a "scripted window" popup warning.

Back to HTML. So the next window I'm going to post about features a guy named St. Maximian and yet another image of Mary, this one in the Immaculate Heart presentation. Here's a two-shot of the pair of windows, added through HTML mode:


Hmmm...still the ugly old interface they used when I first started. Back to Compose.

OK, more options here..was able to increase the image size from "Large" to "X-Large." Still, it's very annoying to be squeezed into a box that's so small.

Looking up St. Maximian through my Google toolbar - let's see how well it adds this...


OK, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V caused the screen to white out until I hit "Enter." Anyway, there's another St. Maximian - let's try adding him through the HTML editor:

St. Maximian of Constantinople - Saints & Angels - Catholic Online

Not much on this guy. The first one at least got hurled out of a tower. And look, there's a third Maximian:


That time there was no white screen after I hit Ctrl+V. Weird. Anyway, this guy was also a bishop, like the first one. Neither is listed as a doctor or prescriber of remedies, which may be significant, though the last one gets a mention of having built St. Vitalis Basilica. No, nothing there - though Vitalis and his wife were martyred by Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris in the movie "Gladiator."

The GUI doesn't like ampersands, especially when I switch back and forth.

Well, so far, the most annoying thing is the eight-line-high text entry box. What gives? I have to wonder if that has something to do with me having my screen magnified when I first opened it.

Let's see if spell-check works...

Yep, that works. Hey, has this been autosaving as a draft? Only one way to find out, and I'm not gonna try. Saving...

Ummmm.  Where's the "Post" button? That's a big oversight!

Ah. It's "Publish" - white text on a gray background. Yeah, very visible. Let's try "Preview" first...

OK, preview worked fine. I'll hit "Publish" and call it a night - after I apply some labels.

(It also doesn't have a "View Post" option after you publish, just "View Blog." "View Post" is useful when you're editing an older post and want to view it after you've edited it. Also, there's some ugliness in the post-publishing page, which I expect is because I'm working in IE8 rather than the next-generation IE interface.)

2 comments:

Todd HellsKitchen said...

Hehe... I enjoyed your step by step... I tooled around with it... But am sticking with the original as long as possible... I know my way around it all too well...

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