Blogger ‘Beta’ Pain

What is it with Blogger & Google? I’ve been happily using Blogger for many a year now with a Blogger username. No problems there. But now Blogger’s upgrading to have a spiffing new labels feature, which would let you tag your posts sensibly and all sorts of nice stuff that they should have added aaages ago, but to get it you have to use a Google login.

So surely that’s fine and dandy? I have a Google login already. So surely Blogger can just transfer my account from their old system over to the new login, I log in with my Google account and everyone is happy…. Surely?

Well apparently not. For the last few weeks, every time I log into Blogger I’m accosted by requests to try the new Beta signup. Every time I say ‘yes’ I’d love to I’m then told I can’t. Way to go UI designers. Ask me to do something I can’t – and then ask me that every single time I log in going forward. Wow. I know Google aims to ‘do no evil’ but constant annoyance can be pretty damn evil if you ask me.

So today it looked as if my dream had come true – the signup process implied I could link my Blogger account with my Google account and all would be good. Again, alas, no. Now I have two Blogger accounts – one with all my stuff in, and one that’s locking down my Gmail username. Great. And of course with Google’s pervasive login (aka, let’s watch what someone’s doing all the time) every time I go into Blogger I’m already in under the wrong username.

So Blogger & Google folks: please get this sorted out before I’m forced to migrate somewhere else just out of principle that I don’t like to support companies that rely on forcing actions & annoyances to get people to sign up. This doesn’t seem like you – so maybe I’m interacting with the mirror universe yous that have goatie beards or something.

PS, Addendum: in reading the Blogger help forum it seems that the main problem is you can’t transfer Blogs that publish via FTP to somewhere other than Blogspot. Not good news as all my blogs are FTP published. I would imagine this is because they are dynamically generating all the pages & label searches on the fly from the Google servers – rather than publishing a static page out to the FTP site. I guess that explains why I was misled in this situation – would have been handy to inform us of that on the way in maybe?

A little while later…

OK – so I’ve only been using the new Blogger UI for a few minutes and, although it in general seems exactly the same – and possibly running faster than before which is good, I have a couple more quick gripes

Firstly, having gone through the rigmarole of getting me to sign up with my Gmail account – why the heck can’t the system already know that I’m in EST not PST? Duh.

Secondly, being used to Flickr’s tagging mechanism of spaces seperating the labels I’d typed in “google blogger” instead of “google,blogger” as I should have. My bad I appreciate – RTFM and all that. So having noticed my mistake I went into the post to try and edit the labels, but now every time I type ‘google’ and then press the comma key, it autofills “google blogger”. Nice. Really nice. Eventually I ended up typing the list of tags I wanted to add in textpad and then cutting and pasting.

More gripes as they come… Oh, and if you’re interested – this post is repeated at my test Beta Blogspot site