Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.
Google Groups is the worst offender for me - it completely breaks my browser's keybindings for going backwards, so every time I'm, eg. searching Googling a bug and open a mailing list archive to find an answer to a bug, I inevitably end up collapsing the thread each and every time, when what I really want is just to go back to the search results. I don't want every Google website to have its own tiling window manager within the page - that's what my OS is for!
Of course, they have no intention of fixing this, it seems. Disabling Javascript just yields an error message - 'Please turn on Javascript to view this page'.
It doesn't matter. I know already what it's about: more ways to get locked-in the "google-verse".
I still love Google overall (so yay on mailing big files and yay on Gmail generally), but the endless feature creep is a weakness, not a strength.
Why make a website and not test it on your own ecosystem? Sometimes I don't get Google.
I'm not entirely convinced, but I've heard worse conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.
You don't need a browser for everything, but working out which pages need a headless browser and which you can get away with scraping sounds like an interesting problem.
/me moves cursor over to the scroll bar only to be intercepted by a pop-up menu containing a logo, helpfully labelled "Logo".
Oh.
wtf
A blogger logo. That's it. That's where the link leads. To blogger logo.
You have to make sure the article body has the keyboard focus first though (e.g. by clicking somewhere on the text); it would be nice if they'd somehow arrange for that to happen by default...
Not only do I have to disable no-script to see any content, but then the page usurps my back button taking me somewhere I don't want to go.
For a company that makes neato flip-book-web3.0-page-turny stuff so well, they sure do fall flat on the blog thing.
Seems like the wrong direction in an increasingly mobile world, feels like this stuff is either tested on very specific mobile devices or not at all.
When I feel compelled to read such a page, I haul it up from Google's cache. (Firefox has an extension to click-ify that. And, fortunately, Google cache functionality is not all ueber-Javascripted -- yet.)
To cut to the chase: These templates are designed for the sake of Google, not users.
I suggest both you readers and users of blogspot do the same.