Blogger's New Interface

I figure if Ron Silliman can post an entry on Blogger's latest interface, I can too. By the way, hi Ron, and thanks for including me on your blogroll.

Seems like Blogger has been changing their interface once every couple of months this year. One change which I have found very useful is the ability to e-mail entries to your blog. Most of my entries are done this way. It reduces my time on-line, and makes it possible for me to do most of my writing at home (where it's appropriate) rather than at work (where it's not).

There is a draw-back, however. The right-hand margin. Most of my entries the past few weeks have been prose; sometimes, however, the line doesn't make it even close to the right margin. There seems to be a glitch in how the program reads blank "spaces". Because I care about such things, I meticulously go through and double-check the space at the end of each line. Missed a few yesterday, but I fixed that this morning.

Anyway, the latest Blogger interface assumes the user doesn't know anything about html. Since this is true of an increasing number of blog creators, this is probably a good feature. There is still an "edit html" option, which is what I use (I like to get my hands dirty on the code).

Like Ron, I'm dissatisfied with the "Preview" function: everything looks like it's in bold. It definitely does not look like it will once you have posted your entry.

One thing Ron mentions is a problem with paragraphs beginning flush with the left-hand margin. Not something I've had trouble with, and I had honestly assumed Ron had intended each paragraph to be slightly indented. Well, I just looked at Ron's html source code, and I think I've identified the cause: he's copying Word documents into Blogger. How do I know this? Little clues, like the code <p=mso PlainText>; that "mso" stands for "Microsoft Office". There's an extensive stylesheet, which looks mighty similar to the trash that MS Word generates when you copy a document into FrontPage.

Hey, Ron: drop me a line (address is available under "E-mail me" on the left), I might be able to help you clean up some of that WORD trash.

Ron also says: "for me the ability to set poems that move away from the left hand margin is always the key." I assume he's talking about a type of "typographic" poetry, here. This is a challenge using html, even with the assistance of Cascading Style Sheets. The root problem is the lack of a standard in browser software. An additional challenge is the control the more savvy users have over how their browsers render a page. So, the best you can hope for is something relatively close to what you intended. I don't currently do poetry that depends much on word placement, but "Never Thunders in Hades" is one example. "Farmer of the Night" is another.

How did I get the word "watching" to float at different points in the line in "Never Thunders"? The use of in line styles; for example: <span style="position: relative; left: 77pt"> This little bit of styling caused the line to begin 77 points left of where it normally would. But I'm still gambling that the user will see things exactly as I do in my browser, which is not a safe bet.

I'm geeking you out, aren't I? Well, you're feeling similarly to what I feel when I read one of Ron's typical entries.