Blogger v/s The World

Metapost Incoming. If this does not interest you, I absolutely would not blame you for moving on. However, if you are considering starting a blog, or new to Blogger, this may interest you.

This is

Formatting

 Formatting posts in Blogger is a pain. I mean a ROYAL pain in the backend. Actually in the frontend because we are dealing with the HTML and CSS.

You see, Blogger is a CMS (Content Management System). It is supposed to help you manage your blog, to easily create new posts, and to provide tools to design a nice looking platform. Their are big names in the industry. WordPress is one, Tumbler is another. Most CMSs have some sort of pay hierarchy.

This is where Blogger stands out. It is simply there, waiting in your Google account. It enables anyone to create a basic blog with little or no hassle. There are some basic themes to choose from, and ways to customize them.

The main way to theme a website is through CSS. CSS is a file that says, for example, the first paragraph should have a dropcap (as mine does) and that drop cap should be a certain color, and lets put a slight shadow behind it. Headings should be a certain size, and lets put an orange line over them.

These are all things I coded into my Blogger CSS. The problem is, in the CSS interface you can only see a portal that is about 5 lines high and 50 characters wide. That is the first issue. The second issue is figuring out the HTML tags blogger is using.

The text format options in the WYSIWYG editor are:

• Major Heading
• Heading
• Subheading
• Minor Heading
• Paragraph
• Normal

HTML heading tags usually run from H1 to H6, with larger numbers being less significant headings. So the 4 options above corrispond to H1 to H4, but I have found no documentation on this. Only by trial and error, and sifting through the HTML have I found that out.

There there are the "Paragraph" and "Normal" tags. These are the ones that really get my goat.

Paragraphs are generally where the main body of text goes on a website. Aside from my bulleted list up here, all of these blocks of text are nested in Paragraph tags. This allows me to point my CSS file to the Paragraph tags and tell them to do fancy things like make the drop cap. I can apply cool fonts. I could have the paragraphs alternate color, or increase the space under each paragraph to keep the text from simply running together.

By my best investigation, the Normal text, ie this text and the rest of the post, is simply text floating in a Div, short for Division, which is a portion of the webpage. The problem here is that every part of a webpage is in a Div. 

So if I apply CSS to the Div, in an effort to apply it to my main body text, it is going to apply to every Div on the webpage. This includes the little title bar at the top, and the Blogger branding at the bottom.

The bigger issue, is that the WYSIWYG editor defaults to Normal. I have to remember to manually reset it to Paragraph when I start a post, after I make a heading, or after I include a list.

It seems like the Blogger team at Google has been trying to improve the product. The basic customizer is becoming more streamlined. I think the UI could still be improved, but it is much friendlier for basic users. Also the extended toolbar (the formatting options that toggles when you click the ellipsis button) has been moving around. Last night it was mostly buried under the "Post Settings" side panel on the far right. Today it is on the far left. Personally, I liked it better when it popped up under the ellipsis button.