Monday, December 31, 2007

Why hasn't anyone improved Blogger's BlogThis! tool?

Blogger is certainly a proletariat blogging tool, but even so it does have a vast number of users, some of whom must be qualified geeks. It also has a well documented API.

So I'm surprised that we're still using the same crummy bookmarklet that we used before Google owned Blogger:
What is BlogThis! ?

....BlogThis! is an easy way to make a blog post without visiting blogger.com. Once you add the BlogThis! link to your browser's toolbar, blogging will be a snap. Or rather, a click. Clicking BlogThis! creates a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post from within BlogThis!...
The Google Firefox toolbar includes a similar function (SendTo Blogger) that may actually be inferior to the original Blogger bookmarklet.

I've used these two solutions for years. They're crummy. Let me name a few of the problems:
  1. No access to tags (labels) from the SendTo Blogger UI or the bookmarklet.
  2. Variable bugs -- lately the SendTo Blogger window has aquired its own redundant scrollbars when used in the latest version of Firefox.
  3. Limited toolbar (no bullets, no image, video, upload)
  4. Using Blockquote tags in RTF when the start of string includes a link creates an empty href tag preceding quoted text.
  5. Many bugs with copying highlighted text into the post, lately truncates text.
  6. No 'edit this post' button on the post-submit dialog. Instead need to right click on edit posts, choose open in new window, then find the draft post in list then click on draft post.
The list goes on.

So why hasn't some Googler devoted a portion of their 20% time to fixing this functionality? Why hasn't any hacker created a Firefox extension to replace the bookmarklet/toolbar function?

I think if we knew the answers to these two questions we'd understand something about a lot other modern software frustrations.

1 comment:

Sharif Al Motawally said...

I agree completely. I hope the blogger developers wake up to this.