git ssb

title: "Three Blogger bugs" date: 2007-11-10 10:41 status: published description: > A summary of several annoying bugs affecting the Googlemonster's blog-publishing service.

tags: blogger, bugs, the Googlemonster

links:

• url: http://www.blogger.com
  title: "Blogger" description: "sucks (somewhat)" rel: related type: text/html

<p>(Stick around for the third one, which explains why these are <em>here</em>.) </p>

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<p>If the label for a post hasn't been used before but matches the start of a label that <em>has</em> been used before, typing the new label into the <samp>Labels for this post:</samp> text box, followed by a comma, inserts the existing label. For example, if you already have a post labelled <kbd>foobar</kbd> and you try to label a new post <kbd>foo</kbd> and <kbd>baz</kbd> by typing <kbd>foo, baz</kbd> into the text box, when typing the <kbd><kbd>,</kbd></kbd> Blogger will automatically complete <kbd>foo</kbd> to <samp><kbd>foobar</kbd></samp>. The work-around for this is to accept the incorrect label then use the arrow keys to delete the extra letters. </p>
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<p>If a post begins with a block-level element (such as a list) rather than an inline-level element (such as <code>em</code> or <code>a</code>) or text, Blogger adds an empty paragraph to the start of the post. </p>
<p>Blogger assumes you'll be writing unsemantic plain text, with paragraphs represented by double line breaks (which Blogger converts faithfully and unsemantically into <code>&lt;br /><br /></code>), so it adds an opening <code>&lt;p></code> tag at the start of each post, in case someone tries to style paragraphs with <abbr class="caps" title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr>; when it comes across the list it closes the open paragraph, leading to an empty paragraph. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Blogger assuming, encouraging and even (occasionally) enforcing unsemantic, awful mark-up. </p>
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<p>When I tried to report these as bugs using <a href="http://help.blogger.com/bin/static.py?page=troubleshooter.cs&problem=bug_with_classic_blogger&contact_type=bug_with_classic_blogger&Submit=Submit">Blogger's bug-reporting page</a>, I was presented with no text entry area of any sort. Silly Blogger. </p>
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<p><ins datetime="2007-11-11T19:56Z">(It was probably foolish to use “three” in the title, but then I'm not sure whether this is a bug or a “feature”:) I roll my own custom templates to match Mooquackwooftweetmeow as closely as possible (visually, anyway); if the full contents of all your blog entries disappear mysteriously, it may be because you've removed the (quite possibly empty anyway) <samp>footer</samp> section. Don't ask me how that makes sense.</ins>
</p>
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</ol>