ACZoom  ·  Archive-2016

Providing assistance recently to a few people who started using Blogger, it becomes clear that while Blogger provides a wide range of tools, some key features are missing. The current feature set of blogger is somewhat confusing in terms of which target audience is actually fully covered.

Here are some things that are not easy to do in current Blogger - while some gadgets or widgets may be claim to provide the feature, they are not really easily usable. Though things do seem to be improving periodically, and there may come a time in the future when a decent, complete set of features is available.

The audience for these type of features is the low-volume blogger, blogging for personal use, and for friends and family. These features are very easy to provide in a hosted version of Wordpress, as a comparison point. It would be nice if Blogger could be used to build a social-media network for a small group, kind of like a friends-and-family network. This is something not doable right now.

1. First, a serious bug. Inviting or adding authors where the recipient is using a non-@gmail address utterly fails. This is especially bad since it is difficult to get required user ids at @gmail.com so it is nice that Gmail itself fully supports using a non-@gmail private domain address to log on and view and send email. Gmail is a bit schizophrenic about this - even when the user logs in using a non-gmail address, it shows the @gmail.com linked account address more prominently. Still, it at least works fine. Not so with blogger. All invites from blogger sent to that same non-@gmail address fail to activate - it keeps reporting that the logged on @gmail account does not match so recipients cannot accept the invite. Blogger requires the linked @gmail.com address to be invited, it does not work with the main non-@gmail address. The "linking" of private domain addresses and the @gmail addresses is essentially not fully working yet at Google, at least for Blogger. This is bad because now users have to give out their @gmail.com id which may quite obfuscated and they cannot use their main address which otherwise works fine with other services like Gmail.
2. Notifications. For low volume blogs, it is useful for the administrators to be e-mailed on any activity on the blog - usually when a comment is posted, but also when a new post is made which is useful when there are multiple authors in a blog.
3. Subscriptions. Automatic emails sent to a list of email addresses where the list is created by the administrator. Now feedburner is supposed to have some tools to help with this, but they are complicated to integrate into blogger. Also, they actually do not have any way for the administrator to automatically subscribe a bunch of email address. Certainly spam and abuse is a problem here, but with proper limits to restrict maximum number of email addresses, and using a low frequency of updates, abuse need not be a insurmountable problem.
4. Need date to be shown on every blog post. Right now blogger only prints date on one post per day. Multiple posts per day are grouped under a single date, and only way to change this is to edit the template. Many people have explained how to do this on the web. I also have some code and a tear-off desktop calendar format date example available. Would be nice if this were easily supported - at least a setting that says "put date header in every post".
5. Better comment spam tools. Right now, only a permanent captcha is available as an option, would be nice to ask for captcha only if spam is suspected.
6. Recent posts and recent comments gadgets. Blogger has gadgets to do this, but the blogger gadgets do not even allow changing the number of entries shown. Third-party gadgets are available, and are much better, though the good ones are from different authors, and integrating both to look similar requires work - font changes, borders, etc.
7. Geo-tagging. Looks like a few years ago, Blogger-in-draft added a geo-tagging feature. It is an extremely useful thing to have, especially for a travel blog (and after food, that is probably the second-most favorite topic of personal bloggers!) But - after that initial release, nothing much has happened - and the feature is not complete. Cannot remove the tag once added. And feature has not evolved at all - by now, would have expected to have it support the full Google Maps search options - such as multiple-city routes., and many other features.
8. OpenID support seems a bit flaky. OpenID 2.0 also does not seem fully supported (return_to discovery not supported?), but 2.0 is not necessary, and even basic OpenID only works intermittently. Most of the time get a "Warning cannot verify credentials" error. But try enough times, works once in a while, so have to repeatedly try to post a comment when using OpenID to log in. The problem here could be elsewhere, but I hosted two OpenID servers SimpleID and phpMyID externally. Both behaved the same way with Blogger - not conclusive of course, but may indicate that the Blogger use of OpenID could be improved. Right now have to try all these things: log in to OpenID before using blogger, log out and log in again between multiple tries, and just keep trying, and eventually, will avoid the "cannot verify credentials" error and get the comment posted.
9. The new Template Designer in blogger is great (and certainly must have taken a lot of effort). A simple extension would be useful - the Advanced section already has a Add CSS button, and an equivalent Add JavaScript would be very helpful. Since it is necessary to insert CSS as well as JavaScript in the HTML HEAD section for many of the modifications necessary, would be nice to have a interface that avoids having to directly edit the template files. There is already a way to create a gadget with HTML/JavaScript code, but that is not always sufficient or enough, so adding a way to insert CSS/JavaScript in the page header would complete the feature set for HTML additions. Another place this could be provided is on the "Add and Arrange Page Elements" in the Blogger Edit Layout settings page - it could have a "Add to HTML HEAD" button.
10. Not a blogger issue directly, but Google Friend Connect issue. It has a very strange user interface to upload a photo. Whatever size photo is uploaded, it only allows users to select a small portion, with a movable clip rectangle. The UI seems to suggest that the rectangle can be re-sized, but it is not possible to do that, at least using Firefox. This is very incomprehensible behavior - why upload a picture of any size and have that clipped? Why not have the default just take the full uploaded picture without clipping - it is far easier to edit images externally and this lets the user create a picture exactly as their profile picture. Now, it is a matter of guessing and trial and error to get the exact picture assigned to a Friend Connect profile. Hope this behavior improves, it is just weird right now. And Friend Connect itself seems very bare - since it lists all the blogs a person has subscribed to, it could offer all other related features - such as periodic summary notifications on updates to blogs being followed, etc.