Blogger has bad UX and it annoys me | Hacker News Reader

Blogger has bad UX and it annoys me

oldschool-mtg.blogspot.com

68 pointsMrJagil53 comments

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..)

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.

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.

Yes it does: https://wordpress.com/support/wordpress-editor/blocks/markdo...

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

> 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.

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)

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.

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/

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?

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.

Still waiting for them to open source P2. It’s been ‘on their roadmap’ for years.

That is true. It was a great mix of being able to write longer posts, and occasionally just share a pic or video.

>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.

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/

I’ve been reading it for 10+ years now. Highly recommend subscribing. It’s also depressing because I’m seeing how we are collectively regressing in graphic design and especially logo design.

Imagine a website that was just people posting links and comments

Comments on an entirely unrelated site are very different from comments adjacent to the content.

I see what you did there ;)

Comments was this religious topic when blogging was getting popular along with other things associated with "real" blogs. Generally I think they're positive but if a given blog tends to attract a lot of low quality drive by comments, it's absolutely reasonable to turn them off.

Anyone still remember trackback?

I think If you didn't care about commenting you wouldn't have an account on HN?

I guess if you don't want comments on your blog then a static site would make sense. I tried that route but the lack of engagement kills all motivation to post anything.

Windows Live Writer and Blogger were an incredible combination for a long time

This will be fixed when consumers understand that paying for good software is the solution for bad software

Wordpress.com is good for most people, in the west at least, considering I don't know about their RTL support.

However, my problems with them is that sometimes, embedding something will not work, and if they don't have their own embed for that link, you can't do anything, as any embed will need javascript, and you don't have it unless you are on an expensive business plan (expensive for a personal blog).

That's actually the only true reason why I use Hugo + Cloudflare Pages instead of wordpress.com.

> 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 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"?

> 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 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"?

Sample of one, but yes

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).

Are you using FB container in Firefox? This would be a known side-effect.

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.

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”.

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.

I really wish there was a right click option for "Open link in this tab"

I hold control down on every link that I click, because I'm so gun-shy about never being able to return to the point that I departed from in the modern SPA-ified web.

If things were still boring server-side HTML pages like geocities in 2000, I might be more trusting.

This is IMO a browser bug. Browsers should allow users to choose "always open in new tabs" or "always open in the same tab" as a default, with modifier + click performing the opposite action, in a way that websites can’t override.

The underlying issue is that tabs were bolted onto existing browsers at some point, and no mainstream browser was designed from the ground up with tabs in mind. As a result, the details of many previously existing features which interact with tabs were never revisited.

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.

Pretty sure it has a bad UX on purpose, they want to get people off the platform so they can shut it down.

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.

Isn’t the issue here that Google has basically abandoned Blogger?

They did a redesign of the writing interface about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24499374

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...

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.

If you're looking for a modern/minimal blogging alternative, you can check out what I built:

https://www.wndr.xyz/posts/9fjM1tOJO7MWX4fYw3AU2Q==/what-s-a...

Not related, but how long do you plan to keep your xyz domain for? I just found out that they apparently last for 10 years max and I don't know what to do with mine anymore. There's so little info about that age limit on the Internet that I can't figure out if there's even a way to get around it.

I was never informed of an age limit. It's not really a problem for me, since I bought the domain dirt cheap. Do you have a source for the 10 year limit?

Sorry I actually think I got thrown off by some poor wording in a NameSilo email. After searching I think the actual restriction is that the domain can't last for more than 10 years after the last time you paid (but you're free to keep moving your 10-year window by continuing to pay) which is way more like what you'd expect. My bad if I alarmed you! I was super confused myself and I was wondering why that supposed limit wasn't more well known lol.

I'd recommend Bear Blog if you're looking for a super minimal blog that just works.

Is blogging still a thing in 2021?

Yes

Probably half of the posts on HN are blogs

Very few are Blogger blogs though, which is what the article is about.

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.

SubStack is now the new rage.

SubStack is just blogging with added mailing lists and payments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com