Bother Blogger!

Sometimes it feels as if all I’ve been doing lately is grumble about Blogger and the changes that are being made to it. I’m not averse to change, truly I’m not, but only change for the better. Change for change’s sake, purely to get a new look without any improvement in function, just makes me cross.

The latest little gem in the ongoing Blogger revamp came earlier this week, when the full-page and pop-up comment formats were changed without warning to the glossy (and barely legible) new Google look, all acres of white space and small, cramped, pale, difficult-to-read text, ornamented with tasteful orange highlights. What do you mean, don’t I like it?

I could have lived, albeit grudgingly, with the new look if it hadn’t brought with it the loss of two invaluable functions – the ability to subscribe to receive later comments by email and, in the full-page format, the ability to collapse comments. Without these, the full-page format, which I’ve always had, became worse than useless and I had no option but to change to the embedded format.

This has proved to be an unexpectedly positive move and I’m really enjoying the ability to reply directly to each comment, rather than having my response appear sometimes several comments below the one I’m replying to. It gives a much stronger feeling of commenting as conversation and is one of the functions I’ve always admired and envied in WordPress blogs.

That bonus apart, I’m left with the time-consuming annoyance of having to go back to many of the blogs I comment on, in order to find and read the author’s response to my comment. I will do it, because I appreciate replies and don’t want to miss them, but I would so much rather be reading and writing new posts. Fingers crossed that the Google engineers will make it a priority to fix this, but I’m not holding my breath….