September 18, 2007

Blogger Behind the Curve?

I am sure I wasn't the only one who greeted Blogger's acquisition by Google with enthusiasm. At last, I thought, I will be free of the editor applet, which has become rather tedious to use.

Alas not, though. While much has changed, and the AJAX-based layout editor is a great improvement, we are still left with a content editor that creates horrible HTML and whose toggle buttons easily lose synchronization with the editor's state.

A recent post by Paddy also highlights the fact that there is inadequate support for posting code. I realise this probably isn't a majority interest, but in this day and age you would think the the world's leading web company could do better.

2 comments:

Doug Napoleone said...

Unfortunately the worlds leading blog software (WordPress) has many of the same problems. The latest version just released tries to address some of the problems, but source code can still be a huge problem. At least the html is now valid and your hand added html is not mangled as bad as it was.

I find it ironic that a file format specifically designed for machine interpretation, is the one machines have the hardest time modifying properly. Are there any great online editors?

Paddy3118 said...

Hi guys,
I can live with the editors they have if they would only make at least <pre> tags work so indentation is preserved and I get a fixed width font. Icing on the cake would be something like Wikipedias [source lang=python] tag.

I'll try and post an indented version of my python script to aid the posting of indented text ;-)


'''
blogspace.py
Turns leading spaces into HTML   tokens which shows
as correct indentation on Blogger comment fields
(and maybe other blogs).

Donald. 'Paddy' McCarthy Sept 2011
'''
import fileinput, re


for l in fileinput.input():
  print re.sub(r'^(\s*)\s',
               lambda m: ' '*m.end(),
               l.rstrip())


- Paddy.
(Not bad on the preview)