Chp 823. Blogging frustrations

Today is the last day of June, 2020. Before most of us even realized it, half the year is now over!

Hard to believe, right? Time just... flew past like that. Woooshh.

The worst part for me is, I did nothing productive in these 6 months. At least nothing that I can boast about or be proud of (completing game achievements doesn't count :P ). This is an eye opener for me to turn my life around in the next six months.

The end of June also means that my blogging platform "Blogger" will be moving to a new blogging interface.

Well, today is the last day of June and this has still not been implemented as the default interface, lolz. But I really hope it is not! Because I have tried out the new blogging interface and I hated it. I mean, everything looked cool, from the new "Stats" interface to comments and search operators, but the main feature, that is, the post EDITOR, was super unfriendly to use!

I've been blogging for 16 years now, with over 50 blog posts per year. And in all these 16 years, I always blog by typing whatever I want to write first on an MS Word document, along with all the HTML codes for links and images, and then once I have completed writing and proof-read and am satisfied, I copy-paste the entire text content to the blogger editor (but I make sure I do a "paste as plain text" to remove the MS formatting like div class=“MsoNoSpacing” style=“text-justify:  inter-ideograph” etc).

I mean, you can always type directly on the blogger editor (in fact that's how you're actually supposed to use it), but I'm just more comfortable typing on an MS Word doc first.

For me, I always use MS Word because its kinda like a force of habit, I guess, from the days of using MS Word to type gazillion assignments during my IIM-B days (when I first started blogging) to years of updating my blog from an internet cafe (because home internet connection back then was super expensive and so I had to type everything from an offline home PC first) and finally, my occupations of being a copywriter in an advertising firm and a designer in a gaming agency, where MS Word was still my most frequently used software.

In the new blogger Editor interface (that is supposed to be the default interface from end of June), copy-pasting from an MS Word document didn't work! The HTML commands for links and images that I had typed manually weren't functioning, and when I tried to paste it in the HTML section instead, it converted the HTML commands to plain text! Line breaks were all mixed up too. Arrrrgh, it was super frustrating.

And so I had to revert to the previous interface. To me, this current (old interface) is still one of the best WYSIWYG editors I have come across. And that is why I am praying that the new interface does not become the default interface.

Things like this just make me lose my motivation to blog. Already we know that blogging is a dying past-time, why hammer the last few nails in the coffin?

Another incident that had really frustrated me is that advertisements were starting to appear on my blog posts again! I had deactivated advertisements on my blog a long time ago because I hate the fact that random ads would just appear in the middle of my post. I don't mind having ads at the top or bottom of my post, but not in the freaking middle, spoiling the flow of what I have written.

These ads don't appear on desktop/laptop browser, but you'll see them if you view my recent blog posts from mobile. I even complained about this, showing them proof that my ads setting was turned off, and that there had been no activity on my adsense account, but alas, there seemed to be no solution.

I mean, I wouldn't mind the extra revenue coming in from my blog (especially now that I am unemployed), but I don't want to compromise on money by giving my readers a bad experience. Making money from my blog had never been my intention since I started blogging 16 years ago. And the worst part is, these ads that started appearing on my recent blog posts aren't even from my adsense account! So yeah, I'm still not getting paid for that even if I have no option, lolz.

It is no secret that people don't blog anymore. I mean, look around you, how many friends do you actually have that still blog? I remember the good old days when there were more than 200 active Mizo bloggers, and I found a lot of great friends because of that, many of whom are still one of my closest friends today. But the blogging community is now just a has-been era.

Putting all that into consideration, it is not surprising that Google (owner of blogger platform) no longer prioritizes its blog user-base. Why spend extra resources to sort out someone's advertising issue or editor issue for a platform that has lost its charm, right?

In fact, just recently I found out that many of my old blog links no longer work! When I see my "Facebook memories notification" of a blog link I had shared years ago on my status, clicking that link now leads to a broken link!

So when Google acquired the blogging platform "Blogger" in 2003 and we could use their "blogspot" sub-domain name [example: mizohican [dot] blogspot [dot] com] as our blog link, everything was cool. And then there was a time when blogging reached its pinnacle and a lot of Indians started blogging, and so we were given a new Indian sub-domain ".in" instead of the ".com". And to avoid confusion, using either the ".in" or ".com" link lead back to the same post. However, if you wanted to copy you blog link from the browser address bar, the default sub-domain link generated was the ".in" one.

Now, if I click on any of those old links I had posted before, the ones with ".in" sub-domain name, it leads to a broken link. All blog post links are now back to being just ".com" only. This was probably done to cost-cut on expenses and domain usage, maybe, I don't know.

But the most important question is, did we read about this change anywhere on social media? Did anybody complain about this change of sub-domain name? Nopes. Nothing. That just shows how much of a dying business this is.

Anyway, yeah, I didn't mean to rant so much. I have a lot to say about blog image hosting services too, but I'll stop here for now. Hopefully, the remaining half of 2020 will be better and brighter for us, especially with regards to the ongoing pandemic. And I hope too that these issues with blogging cease to exist too.

Happy Half Yearly greetings to you all, dear friends. Cheers.