I'm a bit dissapointed with Blogger.com

Hi all

New post to come shortly, hopefully today, but I want to quickly express my frustration with Blogger.com. I've found it a bit awkward to use and the search facility seems to be pretty rubbish too. Something which amazes me when you consider it's part of Google.

I chose Blogger.com because I imagined that it would come up in Google searches very easily. So I was completely amazed that I had to register it with Google and all the other search engines. I might be able to understand that with other engines but you would imagine that Google would know of a new blog on it's servers from the start. When I posted the G20/Ian Tomlinson post I was very disappointed that nobody would be able to find it. (I believe this discussion should be as wide as possible. See my post of July 22.) Of course I understand that people will chose weather or not to read my blog but if they never know of it's existence then how can people make that decision.

Lately it's been asking me to give my log in details each time and when that doesn't work it puts me through a lengthy password reset process that just drains all my enthusiasm to write when I want to. If they don't sort that out I'll be off.

I had been thinking that if it comes to the crunch, i.e. I have more instances of difficulty logging in, then I would move my full archive over to another blog service. However, my preference would have been Blogspot.com but checking that out I find that Blogger and Blogspot are part of the same service so I suppose that means that Google owns my arse now.

That's all a bit unfortunate because up until today I have always had fairly positive emotions towards Google. Please don't mess it up guys.

Am I stupid or something?

So I’ve set this up, well nearly, but how the hell do you set the formatting for the about me section? I’ve tried putting in ‘para’ tags but they aren’t accepted and a ‘break’ tag doesn’t give you any spacing between paragraphs. Why does it have to be so awkward? What on earth happens to people who don’t know any HTML? I only know the basics. Surely the world of blogging isn’t restricted to the technically literate because that’s going to filter out all sorts of people and leave us with geek hell.

I guess this gives a flavour of this blog, there’s going to be a certain amount of irritation about issues of stupidity.

Actually I know bloggs aren't all geek hell so there must be something I'm missing.

Oh and as far as I can see it’s 1175 characters which last time I looked is less than 1200 characters.