25 May 2012

Blogger

I was going to post about the D&D Next playtest packet, but...well...let me ’splain...

One of the things I liked about Blogger was that I could get their editor to produce clean HTML without writing too much raw HTML “by hand”. Well, it still was probably too much, but I made it work for me.

Oh, and it never worked on iOS. A big part of that was that mobile Safari—at least in the beginning—didn’t support features they relied upon, but that didn’t change the fact that it kept me from blogging from my iPhone or iPad. I had hopes the Blogger app would address this, but it didn’t. Again, Apple didn’t make it easy to create a good HTML editor on iOS. Though the Essay app came pretty close while it lasted.

But back to the more immediate issue. They’ve discarded the old editor. I am not happy with this new editor so far.

By the way, this is exactly the same reason why I stopped using Google Docs.

But, I am unusual. I’m picky about the HTML—which to most people is an implementation detail that should be hidden behind the scenes—that is used for my text. I’m picky about how my text looks.

I’ve been trying to go the Markdown route to address the iOS issue. Though I really don’t like working in “plain text” in this day & age. But it did work for my Infogami site. And it honestly is easier than the hoops the old Blogger editor made me jump through to get the results I wanted. The posting part is more complicated, though. The drafts are backing up even faster than they did before because of the extra effort to get a Markdown draft converted, posted, and looking good on Blogger.

I’ve been considering my options for a while now. There’s lots of them, and—as usual—I’m indecisive.

(Interestingly, it looks like the Infogami source code is now available. So that’s another option I didn’t know about until writing this: To run my own copy of Infogami...)