Blogger Peeves

There are a number of issues with blogger that annoy me and keep me looking out a bit at other alternatives. One major disappointment is with posting straight html. I usually use blogger's WYSIWYG compose editor, but sometimes it is too limiting. When I posted my diet plan an diet results (BTW today I weighed in at 199.5 today - Happy New Year), I wrote the article out in an html editor first. I wanted some numbered lists and such, so the editor provided an easy way to get the formating. So to post blogger I figured I would just have to copy the html source into blogger's html editor and presto. Wrong. The lists were screwed up, the indents were screwed up, and the text didn't wrap right to fit the frame. So I essentially had to hand edit to make it look decent. You will notice there are lots of unnecessary line breaks. So today I decided to take another look and AOL journals. My last test there was disappointing, but as at it turned I was using the wrong layout option to do my picture posting test. This time out it was to test an html post, using my diet posting. If you follow this link you will see the results. Complete pass! No editing required, looks just as I typed it. My other peeve with blogger is with how they are handling images which no longer automatically resize in a browser. The details of which are complicated, but well documented. AOL journals handles pictures simply allowing for the resize function to work. AOL does have its drawbacks. Three obvious ones are: 1) Large advertisement banner; 2) Short list of sidebar options with no way of customizing (that I could find); and 3) Boring blog name area (there's got to be a way of prettying it up, but I can't figure out how. Also there is no direct blogging from Picasa, but that hasn't worked for blogger now for a few weeks.