Evagation

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Those crazy kids and their widgets.

If you have noticed that completely static main page for my domain, you'll realize that it's been promising a new site since... oh... about five years ago. Now. I'm not going to get into WHY the new site never surfaced (the strange thing is that I really had almost finished it, and then my computer crashed and I lost a bunch of my work, and once I met my husband, I began to not care as much about sitting up in my room all day, and night, coding a website) because I would just be lying to you all, and I'm trying to stop being such a nasty liar. Except five years ago, when I was coding that site, Cascading StyleSheets were the newest and coolest thing around (they still are the coolest thing around, in case you didn't know) and I was able to code html in my sleep. (I realized the other day that my parents have been completely wrong about me. They always talk about how I took three years of French classes but never became close to fluent, and therefor I do not know any language other than English. NOT TRUE. I am fluent in Hyper Text Mark-up Language. SO THERE, MOM AND DAD.) Back then, blogs were called online journals, and most everyone who had one needed to know at least a moderate amount of html. I swear to you all on every book that I own, that I never thought I would be 26 years old, and complaining in my online journal about those damn crazy kids. Except there are some damn crazy kids running around the internet nowadays. And they want WIDGETS for everything. When I got back into journalling, I kept seeing that word all over the place, especially at Blogger. In fact, Blogger urged me to change from it's classic templates to it's new, improved widget layout. I had to look up "widget" in wikipedia to see what they hell they meant. OH. A widget is just a bit of code to put into your website pages. Now that I knew what Blogger was trying to push onto me, I decided what the hell, maybe these widget things will make my life easier and I won't have to do so much tedious coding. I switched over my blog into their new widget-based layout. In the past few years, I have only been gloriously, spectacularly wrong about a few things (letting my mother-in-law run my wedding day is pretty much the most major mistake I've made in recent history) and, boy, was I REALLY wrong about this new widget stuff. You see. I thought it would make my life easier. That I would be able to say, oh, well, I want a two column layout but within those two columns, I want some nice CSS boxes and I want to be able to easily manipulate all of the major elements in my page from one stylesheet. So, I started messing around with those wacky widgets. Blogger promised me that the only designing I had to do was to select some of these widgets and Blogger would do all of the work for me! I started randomly selecting widgets to go into my blog, just to see how easy it was going to make my life. Then I got really confused. If I pressed the "Image" widget, all Blogger did was give me some image code that I knew in my sleep (you know, like: [img src=url], except without the brackets, obviously). I couldn't believe that this was all the new, purportedly wonderful Blogger was going to do to make my life easier. So, I tried a few more widgets. Same thing. If I clicked "Make a link" (or something similar), it would just write a href= code for me, which is probably the one bit of html that I have never, ever forgotten because I code all of my links by hand using a href= This was the great new Blogger layout?! These WIDGETS? Blogger was turning into freakin' myspace. They weren't out to make my life easier at all, they were actually catering to the teenagers who don't want to learn any html but still have a website (or blog, whathaveyou). Because, seriously, have any of you spent any amount of time on myspace? It's a horrible, horrible place. Full of awful pages with embedded midi (except do people even USE midi, anymore? am I, once again, dating myself with an old skool web term?) files and those wretched backgrounds that render all of the text on the page completely unreadable. Not that I want to read what those teenagers are writing, anyway, but STILL. It's an affront to anyone who appreciates good, clean webdesigns. And now Blogger is in on the game. Except their widgets don't seem to be helping those crazy kids much because they keep flooding the Google/Blogger Discussion Forum (which is here, if you ever want to read the incoherent ramblings of people who don't know what they hell they are doing... well, to be fair, except for the 1% of us who actually post intelligent questions) with their inane complaints. For example. When re-designing this blog, I wanted to do something that I thought would be fairly simple. I had already gotten the posted comments to embed into each entry (that was the easy part--the hard part was formatting the comments so that they looked like they belonged on the page, and not like I just decided to tack them onto the end of an entry just for the hell of it), I had even figured out how to load the Blogger userpics for people who post in the journal through their Blogger account (even though, as of this very moment, the only Blogger user with a pic who posts a comment here is John Q. Casual, Hi John!). After embedding the comments, I wanted to somehow get that annoying "Post A Comment" pop-up to NOT force people to read the exact same comments all over again just to get to the comment form. I posted a question in the Google/Blogger Discussion Forum, asking if anyone knew how this could be done. Vin, of Beta Blogger For Dummies responded that there was no way to manipulate the comment form, and that many have tried before me and failed, so I should really just give up. Of course I didn't give up. I had to show all of those guys that it COULD be done. In fact, it was pretty easy to do, even though I couldn't have done it without the Web Developer add-on for Firefox (an add-on that I completely recommend to anyone who is coding by hand). Which is how I learned that the Google/Blogger forums are not meant for people like me. They are meant for the people who post things like, "Blogger took away my comment link! What happened to my comment link?!" (That was an actual post, in case you think I'm just making all of this up as I go along.) Since I had learned my lesson from posting my own question and not getting a single useful response, I began to take pity on these poor souls, and tried to help them out. Like the girl who claimed that Blogger just took away her "Post A Comment" link. Of course Blogger didn't "take away" anything from her blog. Blogger can't even DO that because, in order for them to be able to do that, they would have to log into your Blogger account, go to your blog template (or "layout," if you're a widgeter) and physically remove the commenting code from your template. Which, OF COURSE, is not something Blogger can actually do. The most they can do is disable your blog for breaking the Blogger TOS. So, in the interest of helping someone else because I was still smarting from being told that mine was a useless question, I checked out the source of that girl's blog. Just to see what was going on. And oh, dear lord. If you ever want to make yourself crazy, spend a few hours in that help forum and check out the source code for some of the blogs. Because the source code will make no sense. After realizing that the missing-comments girl had obviously done something wacky with her template because she had a span class (from her stylesheet, in case you all are not fluent in CSS) for her comments but no Blogger code for posting comments. None. And there is quite a bit of Blogger-specific code (called "tags" in classic Blogger and, obviously, "widgets" in the new Blogger) that you must include in your template if you want to enable commenting in your blog. The other hilarious (to me) thing was that she had also, very obviously, messed her stylesheet up because the span class that she was using for formatting her comments didn't even exist in her stylesheet. This is what happens when people use pre-made Blogger templates and try to mess around with them, except they don't know what the hell they are doing, so they end up doing something like removing the Blogger "Create a Comment" tags without even realizing it. And then, when I tried to explain to the girl that you have to put the Blogger comment tags INTO YOUR TEMPLATE in order to enable commenting, she responded that I didn't know what I was talking about, and that Blogger had stolen her comment link and, not to worry, she had already written to them about it and she was sure they would be restoring her link very soon. See, Blogger? This is what your crazy widgets hath wrought. People who don't even know when they make a mistake, and then blame YOU, Blogger, for their mistake. At least I blame you for things that you are actually guilty of (like that annoying "Post a Comment" pop-up, and using the meta tags to embed your OWN stylesheets into every single Blogger blog, which over-ride my remote-hosted stylesheet, forcing me to write my own meta tags even though I don't understand why you would do that to me, Blogger, why would you use meta tags for your own, nefarious purposes?). I promise that the seemingly never-ending entry will actually end. At some point. Hopefully soon. Since Devin and I were stuck together in a car for a good seven hours this weekend, I relayed to him all of my Blogger woes. Complaining about how difficult Blogger makes life for those of us who just want to write our own code, and use our own stylesheets. Then I bragged a little bit about being the only person who has figured out how to manipulate the "Post A Comment" link to jump straight to the comment form, effectively by-passing all of the posted comments. And I might have done a bit of complaining about that Beta Blogger For Dummies site because, while it might have some useful information on it, the design is so wacky that trying to find an answer for whatever question you may have is pretty darn difficult. (I also might have editorialized a bit about how ugly I think the site is, and that a help site should be beautiful, and simple, otherwise some people might not take the advice held within very seriously because the site is so poorly designed.) Which is when Devin told me that he was sick of hearing about Blogger, and that maybe I should just make a section in my blog for Blogger griping, and use that section to educate people about how to properly manipulate your template, and stylesheet, and that you CAN make your blog look pretty, and simple, and have it do everything you want it to do (well, ALMOST everything, since there is really no way to get around the Blogger post-a-comment form--you cannot embed it into your blogs like the blogs on Wordpress, or Typepad). Except, sadly, my foray into the Google/Blogger forums has taught me that people really don't want to LEARN how to do all of this great, and nifty-keeno html and CSS stuff, they just want a bunch of widgets to do it all for them. And thus ends my rant about those crazy kids and their widgets. (P.S. After digging around the Google/Blogger Forums all morning, I have realized that about one third of the questions that get posted there are actually intelligent, genuine pleas for help. Which is why I'm so happy that I'm able to start helping some of these people. It feels good to actually use all of my html, CSS, and Blogger knowledge for something more than just making myself a bunch of pretty blogs. Although I'm steering clear of those damn crazy kids, mainly because I don't know how to help them with their widget questions, anyway, since I'm not using the Widget Blogger. What's even more fun is that I'm actually finding new blogs that are well-written, and interesting, so I should probably cut the Google/Blogger Forums a bit more slack. They are definitely not all bad.)

Labels: blogger, webdesign, widgets