“New and Improved”—Yeah, Right

With some trepidation, I switched over to an upgraded version of Blogger a few days ago, and found that my apprehensions were fulfilled. Often when the computer world (or elsewhere) promises something "new and improved", it's a time to worry.

Much of the worry is that, to make the new thing work, I'll have to learn some new skills. Another part of the worry is that very often whatever worked fine in the old version gets messed up in the new version. I've found that posting in the new version of Blogger has become exasperatingly more difficult. Fonts and font size don't obey commands to go to the desired state, extra paragraph marks and html notations appear out of nowhere and firmly resist being removed, and formatting (like underlines and placement on the page) disappears and I can't replace it. What used to take a minute now takes up to half an hour just to get some semblance of what I want—and even then I have to settle for something that is, at best, “readable”.

The big reason I switched is that the new version of Blogger promised that I will be able to list my archived material by theme, since it has become evident that I write blogposts in several categories. Some readers may be interested in only some of what I write. If they're interested in what I have to say about being orthodox in the Episcopal Church, they may be puzzled or bored by a post about a ruined adobe on a desert mountaintop.

So if Blogger can’t or won’t fix the problem, I will probably move this blog to another site which, I hope, will be more manageable. In the meantime, I’m sorry for formatting problems that may appear in these posts.