[HN Gopher] Blogger has bad UX and it annoys me
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Blogger has bad UX and it annoys me
Author : MrJagil
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-07-27 21:14 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldschool-mtg.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldschool-mtg.blogspot.com)
| MatekCopatek wrote:
| > Trying to be helpful by automatically doing stuff I don't
| necessarily want.
|
| Wholeheartedly agree. My #1 personal pet peeve that fits this
| description is links that automatically open in new windows/tabs.
|
| You might (correctly) assume that most people want to open
| certain links (e.g. document previews) in a new tab, but that
| doesn't mean you need to force it upon them. Let them decide if
| they want to click with the left or the middle button.
|
| Do you really think there are people out there who read your
| website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in
| the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone
| -\\_(tsu)_/-"?
| geewee wrote:
| Sometimes I absolutely do not go back. If I'm the middle of
| filling out a complex form e.g., and a link nukes the form
| history. If it wasn't that important to me I might not go back
| and refill it.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I really wish there was a right click option for "Open link in
| this tab"
| skhr0680 wrote:
| > Do you really think there are people out there who read your
| website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened
| in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone
| -\\_(tsu)_/-"?
|
| Sample of one, but yes
| josefresco wrote:
| > Do you really think there are people out there who read your
| website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened
| in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone
| -\\_(tsu)_/-"?
|
| Facebook does this. Their links open in the same window, but
| nuke the back history. I've clicked a FB link multiple times
| and then tried to go back and was justifiably confused (at
| first) and then upset (every time after).
| olah_1 wrote:
| Similar to doing ctrl+s five times in a row on a document,
| this pattern leads to the new anxiety driven UX of right
| clicking a link and carefully selecting "open in new tab".
| egeozcan wrote:
| Are you using FB container in Firefox? This would be a known
| side-effect.
| josefresco wrote:
| That must be it! Now that I know it's Firefox protecting
| me, and not Facebook trying to trap me, I'm thrilled!
| Although from a UI perspective that should have been more
| obvious to me.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| There's an obvious solution to this: don't treat websites like
| programs, and never trust sites.
|
| I learned this lesson over a decade ago. After being burned over
| and over because some shitty browser or site bug ate my post I
| now use One Weird Trick on every post I write:
|
| 1. Write it.
|
| 2. Select it and Ctrl+C it.
|
| 3. Post it.
|
| If the post gets eaten, the text is safe in the clipboard,
| waiting for another go. This is for shorter posts. For longer
| ones, multi-paragraph stuff considered over hours or days, it
| lives in Notepad until it's ready to post. NEVER compose anything
| in a webpage form. They just can't be trusted.
| ethor wrote:
| Is blogging still a thing in 2021?
| shp0ngle wrote:
| SubStack is now the new rage.
|
| SubStack is just blogging with added mailing lists and
| payments.
| powerlogic31 wrote:
| products are much more than just their features. Substack
| have a great narrative..
| 0xdeadb00f wrote:
| Yes
| robjan wrote:
| Probably half of the posts on HN are blogs
| execat wrote:
| Very few are Blogger blogs though, which is what the article
| is about.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Blogger fell out of favor years ago after a redesign
| confronted everyone with a loading screen before showing
| the content, because for some reason some overzealous
| developers decided that web apps are the future, even if
| blogs are statically generated content. Searching on HN,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374 comes up for
| example.
|
| Google will pull the plug on Blogger at some point.
| addicted wrote:
| Isn't the issue here that Google has basically abandoned Blogger?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They did a redesign of the writing interface about a year ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374
| Syonyk wrote:
| They did. And it's so bloody terrible, in terms of UI and
| basic "text appearing when you type" performance (load up a
| bunch of photos in a post and it lags exceedingly badly) that
| I moved my blog entirely off Blogger.
|
| I've got some video of how badly broken the new interface is,
| in terms of "actually letting you write blog entries" in my
| post here. It went from perfectly fine to "literally unusable
| on the hardware I tended to write on, with a typical number
| of photos in a post."
|
| https://www.sevarg.net/2020/10/10/end-of-blog-new-blogger-
| in...
| inside6 wrote:
| Pretty sure it has a bad UX on purpose, they want to get people
| off the platform so they can shut it down.
| hsn915 wrote:
| I find it so strange that blogging is such a simple problem to
| solve but there's really no service that does it nicely.
|
| There was a while when everyone was basing their company's
| official blog on Tumblr! The space is so bad people were using
| Tumblr for their official company blog!!
|
| Then came Medium and for a while people rejoiced but then it
| turned into an annoying website.
|
| Yea there are "many" blogging services but each one lacks some
| important things that make them "meh".
|
| - You need to have a commenting system. A blog that is just a set
| of static pages is not so interesting. I suppose the hard part
| here is fighting spam?
|
| - You must support non-latin languages. Sometimes I blog in
| Arabic and I want RTL support on my blog.
|
| - You need an RSS feed and email subscriptions. Let people build
| up their audience.
|
| - You need to support multimedia (images, movies, audio ..)
|
| - You need to support input by several languages (markdown, html,
| wysiwyg)
|
| - You need a set of decent looking themes and have them be
| somewhat customizable
|
| - You need to be easy to setup! If you're a hosted service, this
| is often a non-issue, but if you're a "you host your own blog"
| you need to provide something better than "here's the source, now
| install these twenty different development tools and run all
| these commands here and there and edit these fifteen config files
| so you can build and configure your blog".
|
| - You need to provide the user with a way to easily get all their
| content so they can switch _away_ from your platform. If the data
| is in a special format you should provide them the tools
| necessary to export to various other formats (html, pdf, etc..)
| Veen wrote:
| WordPress has all of those things. It's fairly easy to set-up
| and it's secure if you update it every once in a while.
| hsn915 wrote:
| Does it let you post content in markdown?
|
| This is important because to me a blog is just a place to
| publish my writings. I _must_ be able to write somewhere else
| in my preferred format and just use the blog to publish it.
|
| As far as I can tell, wordpress only lets you write in their
| own wysiwyg editor, or plain html. Nothing else.
|
| So if I want to publish to it in markdown, I have to first
| export markdown to html separately.
| actionscripted wrote:
| Yes it does: https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-
| editor/blocks/markdo...
| CyanDeparture wrote:
| WordPress probably has the highest barrier to entry when
| setting it up on a server, but it, for all it's misgivings,
| does off all of the features in the best ways. If only it was
| easier to customize.
|
| "WordPress is the worst blogging platform, except for all the
| others." - Winston Churchill
| sombremesa wrote:
| > has the highest barrier to entry when setting it up on a
| server
|
| Most people looking for self hosting plus no-code will just
| install it from a cpanel, which works well enough.
|
| I just don't see the argument here.
| minikites wrote:
| >You need to have a commenting system.
|
| Why? Lots of successful blogs don't have comments and there is
| a good argument to be made that comments make a blog worse, not
| better.
| mavhc wrote:
| Imagine a website that was just people posting links and
| comments
| minikites wrote:
| Comments on an entirely unrelated site are very different
| from comments adjacent to the content.
| thunderbong wrote:
| I see what you did there ;)
| pier25 wrote:
| I pay a subscription to Brand New[1], which is a blog about
| branding and design. Sometimes the best content is in the
| comments.
|
| It also creates a sense of community. That blog is definitely
| niche, but you see people with your type of interests and
| ideas commenting there.
|
| [1] https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/
| JustARandomGuy wrote:
| Tumblr gets a bad rap because it's connected to politics, but
| for a considerable time it was the best blogging platform: the
| themes were simple and clean, it supported code fragments, had
| different post types (picture, video, etc). I still can't find
| a Wordpress theme that mirrors the clean look of basic Tumblr
| (if anyone has any suggestions, even paid options, I'm all
| ears)
| Kluny wrote:
| The P2 theme was pretty good when I worked at WordPress (see
| older version here https://kodedansk.wordpress.com/). They
| seem to have added some bells and whistles since then, but it
| looks like the intention is the same - content first, and
| make the presentation get out of the way.
|
| https://wordpress.com/p2/
| zo1 wrote:
| Looks pretty solid!
|
| Unrelated side note: that template looks so much better by
| removing this silly css style: .site { max-width: 1200px}
|
| Still responsive, still looks great on all widths. Why is
| it that all the websites out there have this?
| nitrogen wrote:
| Can't speak to this theme, but in general: Some users
| don't like unmaximizing and resizing their browser
| windows, and also don't like reading full-width text on a
| widescreen monitor. Rather than browsers providing a
| workable solution for all users regardless of window
| size, sites have to accommodate this.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| That is true. It was a great mix of being able to write
| longer posts, and occasionally just share a pic or video.
| hsn915 wrote:
| Yea, exactly.
|
| My point is not about its reputation ..
|
| Tumblr was not designed for traditional blogging. It has no
| commenting system for example, just a "retweet"-like feature;
| I forgot what they called it.
|
| It was aimed more towards teenagers and young people - as far
| I can tell.
|
| It just happened to have these very important features:
|
| - Post in markdown
|
| - Good looking themes with customization
|
| As far as I can tell, that's really it! If you make a
| platform that just provides these two things all the YC
| startups will probably use your new service instead of Medium
| or whatever else they are using.
| HermanMartinus wrote:
| I'd recommend Bear Blog if you're looking for a super minimal
| blog that just works.
| okareaman wrote:
| I'm getting old. I've been thinking about where I would blog if I
| wanted it to last 50 years after I'm gone.
| swiley wrote:
| People who think it's ok to overload multitouch gestures should
| be shot.
|
| On iOS you have:
|
| 1) One finger swipe (scroll)
|
| 2) One finger swipe (forward/backward history navigation)
|
| 3) One finger swipe (forward/backward post navigation)
|
| Desktop Firefox on Xorg has better UX on a touchscreen than this
| _bullshit._
| warglebargle wrote:
| Being mad about auto-save is kind of wild... is it their
| implementation that's the problem? A save button seems like one
| of software's biggest anachronisms. Under what conditions would
| someone prefer an unsaved file on the precipice?
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(page generated 2021-07-28 19:01 UTC)