Saturday, September 19, 2020

Google, nobody asked to make the Blogger interface permanent

As a followup to my previous rant on the obnoxious new Blogger "upgrade," I will grudgingly admit Blogger has done some listening. You can now embed images and links similarly to the way you used to, which restores some missing features and erases at least a part of my prior objections. But not the major one, because usability is still a rotting elephant's placenta. I remain an inveterate user of the HTML blog view and yet the HTML editor still thinks it knows better than you how to format your code and what tags you should use, you can't turn it off and you can't make it faster. And I remain unclear what the point of all this was because there is little improvement in functionality except mobile previewing.

Naturally, Google has removed the "return to legacy Blogger" button, but you can still get around that at least for the time being. On your main Blogger posts screen you will note a long multidigit number in the URL (perhaps that's why they're trying to hide URLs in Chrome). That's your blog ID. Copy that number and paste it in where the XXX is in this URL template (all one line):

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=XXX&useLegacyBlogger=true#allposts

Bookmark it and you're welcome. I look forward to some clever person making a Firefox extension to do this very thing very soon, and if you make one post it in the comments.

7 comments:

  1. Thank you for this. The Fisher Price design is awful.

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  2. Ah yes... good old url edits. They've been a great workaround for decades.

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  3. P.S.it doesn't work anymore. Do you have any other solution to go back to legacy blogger, please?? I'm counting on you :)

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    Replies
    1. It bit me too. I haven't found a workaround yet but if I do I'll post it. Ugh.

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  4. Yes, this stopped working yesterday.

    Someone found out about it, and put a redirect in, because you can see the old interface before it redirects.

    Jerks.

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