Thursday, July 14, 2005

Blogger Irritations

With Blogger, Google has provided a fine easy-to-use tool for setting up a simple site. But as someone familiar with writing HTML and CSS from scratch, there are some limitations of this environment that are bugging me. If you know of a workaround, please post a comment.

I want the complete date and time of each of my posts to be displayed before each post, but cannot figure out a way to do this. The <$BlogDateHeaderDate$> tag sticks in the date but if there are multiple posts for the same day, repeating dates are automatically suppressed. I can find no way to turn off this behaviour. Removing the tag from the enclosing <BlogDateHeader> tags just turns off the functionality completely.

Under Settings, the Timestamp Format setting does not have many options. For instance it has far fewer than the Comments Timestamp Formats, which is odd. You'd think they'd offer the same flexibility.

Speaking of which, while there are many Comments Timestamp Formats, the ones I would actually like to use are not available. Rather than have exhaustive lists of every different way one could possibly represent a date and time, it makes far more sense to allow us to define our own using some standard notation.

The tag <$BlogItemCreate$>, puts in a "post a comment" link. I can see no way to change the text of this, or the style, though it does obey anchor tag formatting.

Though I have the setting "Show Quick Editing on your Blog?" turned on, I cannot edit my comments. This means that even stupid little typos have to stay where they are. Is it possible to edit comments?

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2 comments:

windows95 computer said...

In September 2009, Google introduced new features into Blogger as part of its tenth anniversary celebration. The features included a new interface for post editing, improved image handling, Raw HTML Conversion, and other Google Docs-based implementations.

Thanks
Michael

robin said...

...and that made some things easier and some things quite a bit more difficult. The system is now almost insanely complicated for anyone who wants to do detailed hacking.

I now recommend people only use Blogger if they are happy with the canned customisation potential.

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