So Much For That

Last Updated on: 27th November 2013, 09:17 am

Remember the other night when I was all happy because I finally fixed the posting system so that it wouldn’t mangle all of my html anymore and even gave you that link to prove it? Well, that must have been a fluke because everything I thought I fixed is broken again and I honestly have no idea why. All of the settings that I changed and saved are still there but it’s doing what it did before I changed anything.

If you’re wondering why I don’t update as much as I used to, this is a big part of the reason why. I write all of my posts offline because it’s easier for me to do it that way. I write perfectly good html in Notepad and then paste it into the post box and hit publish. What’s supposed to happen is the system will post what I wrote the way I wrote it. It’s a great system when it actually works. The problem is that every time I try to link to something, no matter what I do, the system always breaks my tags and a few times, especially tonight, it even moves words I wrote within those tags to different places or worse yet, manages to put words that were in plain text into the tags and leaves everything else out, completely screwing up not only the tag, but the link itself.

I know that there are other people with their own blogs who read this site and I’d love to know if any of you are having the same trouble and how you managed to fix it or at least work around it if you did. Asking support got me nowhere. they told me what to do and it worked for exactly 1 post so I need some other opinions here.

I’ve honestly just about had it. I don’t want to stop updating and give up on the site, I have too much fun with it and judging by some of the stuff that’s gone on on the comment boards [most of which has been deleted by our board provider because we’re on the free system] and some of the emails and personal comments I’ve gotten from people, I know that for the most part you guys have fun here too. But because of all of the technical problems and extra work that it takes to write everything now, it’s not really all that easy to get motivated to write anything good. I’ve got topics and I’m always finding amusing things to post when I don’t, but when things don’t work like they should and there’s seemingly nothing I can do about it, sometimes I just can’t be bothered to put them up.

Sorry for the rant, but it bothers me to no end when people feel that they need to fix something that wasn’t broken in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about innovation and improvement, but I find more often than not that what’s being fixed ends up broken when it’s all said and done. For example, how many times have you seen a perfectly good, well organized and easy to navigate website get redesigned into a completely unusable piece of shit while the person responsible for it crows about it like he’s just done the greatest thing ever and should win some kind of award for it? Well to me that’s exactly what happened when the people at blogger decided to tweak the post editor over the Summer. In fact the only reason that I can post at all is because I’ve got a really smart friend and because I was smart enough to figure out that I had to write some sort of weird half html half plain text mess just so that line breaks would appear properly.

I’m sure that the new system is great for some of you, probably most of you but don’t forget that when you’re blind and can’t see all of the snappy new features and your computer access software can’t either because everything is overly visual, all bets are off.

Anybody who knows me or who has read this site for a while knows that I hate to use the blindness thing unless it’s relevant to the situation because I honestly think that too many blind people wine too much but this time I’ll make an acception and go totally blind guy on you. For an organization that claims that they are working to address access issues, Blogger isn’t off to a very good start. If they really cared as much as they claim they do, they would have put an option in place that would allow people to use the old system while they had actual blind people test out the new one to make sure it actually worked. I’ll bet that would have been appreciated by everybody, not just the blind.

I’m sure that by this point some of you are probably thinking “Jesus Christ, for a guy using a free service you sure complain a lot. You get what you pay for, dick,” and I would probably agree if I didn’t think that you were wrong.

Think about it this way. I might not be paying for the domain name, the webspace, the server, the maintenance of it or anything else associated with the day to day operations of blogger for that matter but if it weren’t for people like me and the millions of other people who use this service, there wouldn’t be a company to pay for in the first place. The business model they’ve chosen leaves no room for argument on that point either, allow me to demonstrate.

It basically works like this. Blogger gives me a free place to write things, and I in turn write them for free. People come to the place where I’m writing them and Blogger gets more hits which translates into more ad money for them which means that they get paid. Sometimes the people who come to read the things I write decide that they want to write things too, so they set up their own place to write things and the cycle repeats itself. Doesn’t sound like a bad little system to me, and it seems that Google thought the same thing since they bought the company. The Google people aren’t stupid, they know a good concept and a good revenue stream when they see one.

But back to my point, that being why I can bitch about what I’m getting for free. When you visit most websites all you’re doing is reading things that other people wrote. don’t get me wrong, you’re an important part of the site because without people to read things that people write, there would be no site, thusly it follows that there would be no need to write things especially if you’re looking to get some money out of it. But Blogger is a different story. They might have built the system, but I’m the content provider. So the way I see it, it’s an even trade if you exclude the fact that they’re getting rich not only off of their hard work, but also off of mine while all I’m getting is a free way to make other people money. Ok, so maybe that’s not entirely fair. This free site does allow me to have my voice heard as well as a chance to promote other things that I’m involved in. But still, I’m doing a lot of the leg work here to make sure that this company survives so as a volunteer worker here I think that I have a right to complain about an organization that isn’t treating it’s employees the way that it should.

The bottom line is that I’m not going to stop posting on the site, but I’m not going to stop complaining and trying to make things right either. So all of you will just have to put up with some technical problems and a little bit of cursing along with your fun. But come on, what do you want for free?

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