Blogger changes again............

.

Yesterday Blogger informed me that the editor I've been using to make these posts was changing. It asked me if I wanted to see the new version. I said "sure," and it changed me over to use it. That's not what it asked me; not so sure I would have said "sure," had I known a "yes" was going to shift me to the new version right then!

So far, I hate it.

My next post took me about twice as long as it would have taken, had I been using familiar tools.

They seem to be moving in the direction of shoving more and more GUI (graphic user interface) down our throats.

Sigh.

If things look funny, and I have to keep re-publishing things as I try to get the formatting the way I want it, that would be why.

Sigh.

Update:  10:27 am   Well, ok, maybe I don't hate it so much.

Today it is different from yesterday...................

They have added the capacity to upload a big group of pics in one swell foop, rather than making me touch them individually one by one by one, as before.  This is a major improvement from the way I used to do it.

In addition to that, today I can add all of those just-uploaded pics to my post with one click (yesterday I had to add them individually).

These two changes will probably swing me over to thinking this new version is a good idea...........

Oh -- and my formatting wasn't all messed up when it actually published.  At least -- not in Firefox.  I should check what it looks like in IE..............   Ok there, too.  Whew.

.

well, it only took me three hours......

I should have paid attention to exactly when I started trying to recover from switching to the new blogger.

I have just now finished.

I'm sure anyone who looked at my html would be horrified.

I have no idea how I am *supposed* to have done most of these things, but the hacking (and I do mean that in the "crudely, with an axe" sort of way) seems to have worked, so....... For example, to make it "stop writing the blog name on top of the banner", what I did was make its writing 1% high and light gray.....

But hey, you can't see their writing, on top of my banner which has *my* writing, right?

Sheesh.

They don't seem to have any way, in their link widget section, to have an image that is linked to somewhere else. This seems like a serious shortcoming. I managed to hack my linked images in, but not because they were helpful about it.

The only thing I learned that I think might be actually useful to anyone else is -- be sure to check the "expand widgets" box, when you are editing your template's html. I added a link using the gui, and then went back to the html, expanded the widgets to see what they did, hacked the guts out of the widget the gui added, and put in my pic/links instead.

The banner was more trouble yet. Thank goodness for the "preview" button.....

I know it could have been a lot worse, but switching was no fun.

I'm glad it's over (she said, optimistically.....).

I HATE CHANGE

As I suspected might happen, I was forced to switch to the new blogger.

All my changes to the template have been lost. My banner, my sidebar.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I am quite adept with computers, and speak fairly fluent html, but in the last 45 minutes I have not been able to discern how to get back to MY blog, as *I* want it.

Not feeling cared for and shared for, not one little bit.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

And while we're on this topic, why is this text editing window so #*&*% small?