Blogger Defects

This week's defect is one that has been building up for a while. So much so that I really should have reported these sooner and they may have been resolved by now. In any case I found a better solution for me, but you will have to wait for my next post.

These have not been directly reported to blogger. Their defect reporting mechanism is for the user to post on Google Groups. This is hardly a formal support mechanism in my eyes. I prefer to raise my defect through formal channels. The owner will get back to me if need be. Having a public knowledge base is fine, but it should be updated and maintained after each report. This allows similar defects to be collated together. It also means that I am not searching through a forum to see if someone else has raised the defect. There are 17,000 posts under Blogger Support on Google Groups. End Rant.

Defect: Future dates

The 'post options' section of a post by default sets the current date and time of when you created the post. The problem is that this information is used for future dating (or in my case past-dating posts). I can take up to two weeks to write a post. Some of my longer, more involved, posts do take that long as I primarily write my posts in between compiles. Little snippets here and there. When I finally do post the date of the post is published from when I started my draft. This is not common usage. Specific post dates should only be applied if the user specifies the date. Otherwise the date/time of the post should be when I click "publish post". This defect has only existed since they implemented future dating functionality.

To replicate:

1. Create blogger post before midnight


2. Wait until after midnight


3. Publish post


4. The post will be published with yesterday's date rather than today's.

Workaround:

Manually update the post date/time to a few minutes ago before you post.

Reliability Issue: Connection with blogger.com

Just recently the number of times the autosave process fails because it cannot connect to blogger is increasing. this never used to occur but it is at the current point in time occurring approximately once every two days.

This forces me to cut and paste my post into a notepad document and then re-edit my post. After this I must re-create my links. Not a pleasurable process.

I am unsure how to replicate this but it may be related to the number of times the autosave process is fired off. It may be worth reducing that amount to a timer or similar. Or implementing a mechanism by which the connection is reestablished.

Potential Defect: XML Support

Blogger posts do not like XML markup. This makes it difficult to write about xml. In my post here I struggled because of this issue. Cutting and pasting xml into my edit box at one point caused me to lose my entire post due to some on-save process.

If blogger.com is steadfast in its lack of support for xml content presentation, a solution is to sanitise message text on save to avoid such issues.

Usability: Poor script performance on low-end machines

The "Save Now" / "Autosave" function is too eager. It fires off on every keystroke. This impacts performance on low end machines where it can almost impossible to write properly. I shudder to consider performance on a mobile device.

Part of the problem is the lack of flexibility in the autosave mechanism. Low end users should be provided with a session based option to disable autosave or at least push it out to a configurable time limit.

Finally, the autosave option fires on nonvisible characters. For instance, using the arrow keys to navigate around a post will cause the autosave feature to fire. This not required and a performance penalty on low end machines.

Suggested usability enhancements

• Images when added are always inserted at the top of the post. This is a pain, especially for someone who is writing a long post.

• A mechanism should be provide (outside of HTML crafting) to allow users to specify wider posts. The current post width is akin to writing on the side of a milk carton. While there is some justification for maximising the post width to a fixed line length to improve readability it, ideally should be left to the users.