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Comment by reneherse | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, but anyone using the Blogger platform should know that the UX on a touch interface is a nightmare. There's roughly a 2 out of 3 chance that any action taken to zoom in on the page or an image will result in navigating away from the current post.

Blooger is one seemingly moribund service I wish Goggle would spend some dev time on.

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Author of the post (and blog) here. I agree with you. I keep assuming that Google will update Blogger but it increasingly seems like it will end up going the way of Reader and will just get ignominiously phased out someday. If anyone has any suggestions of a good alternative, I'd be interested to hear them.

https://ghost.org/ is pretty a nice blogging platform.

Medium?

Self-hosted wordpress, etc

No. Self-hosted anything is not a good alternative for someone running on blogger. The entire reason for using blogger is to not worry about any of the things associated with hosting your own service.

(That's not to say you shouldn't self-host but it's not a great suggestion for someone who made the decision to use blogger in the first place.)

For one, I often read Dan Piponi[0] / sigfpe's articles on my phone, and they sometimes have long equations that stretch off the page. If you drag the page in the commonsense way, you end up moving to another post, as you say: I've somehow subconsciously learned to drag at an angle and then correct by scrolling up or down as needed. It's sad that it has to be done, but it works.

[0]: Here's a delightful classic with pictures: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2009/05/three-projections-of-doctor-f...

Which is kind of interesting considering many of Google's own blogs have received impressive facelifts in the last year and still, as far as I can tell, run on blogger.

What wasn't working for you / could have been much better? I didn't even notice, reading on my phone.

The problem is that the hidden affordance for navigating the blog website interferes and becomes confused with OS and browser-level touch inputs. This happens on mobile as well as desktop when using a touchpad.

When attempting to pinch-zoom, many times the gesture will activate Blogger's hidden navigation feature, taking one to the next or previous post of the blog. On its own, the post navigation is activated by a swipe either right or left. (And your guess is as good as mine as to which way through blog history each swipe takes you.)

Occurs on: iOS/Safari MacOS/Chrome/using touchpad

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