by Chris McGinty (According To Whim .com)
Google is on my shit list lately. I don’t know what it is that they’re doing, but it’s starting to irritate me. The first instance is that they want me to link my You Tube account to my Google account. In concept this is ok, but I’m not a fan of linking all of my online stuff. It wasn’t a big deal when they were just “suggesting” that I do, but now, it’s required.
I keep most of my accounts public, and just don’t put any personal information up, but what if I chose instead to share some information with some people on one site, while not sharing that information with others on another site? Then all of a sudden, I’m required to link the accounts? So much for my privacy!
Miguel told me that he set up a separate You Tube account for his daughter, and when they asked him to link his accounts, he did. Well, apparently now he’s having some sort of issue where he can’t link his regular account, because it’s tied to the same email as his daughter’s account.
So perhaps that’s bad enough, but then recently, for no reason that I understand, our blogspot formatting window isn’t working right. When we try to change the look of anything using the automatic composer, we instead end up with a big jumbled mess when we publish the post.
When we first started doing the blog, I would write my post in Word, and then I would copy/paste it into the compose box. I would add links where necessary, and I would use the “justify” setting for the text so that each margin was even like in a book. Some time later, for no reason that I understand, this stopped working, and I would instead have to copy/paste into the html field, and then add links and justify the margins in the compose field. It was just a slight extra step. Then this most recent change happened. Now I copy/paste it into html, and don’t do anything with the formatting in compose because it will jumble the whole thing up. Thanks Google!
I’m sure they’ll get this fixed soon, if everyone is having the issue. What Nathan is worried about is that the look of our blog page is a little customized, and what if that’s what’s causing the problem? If that’s the case, then I guess we may have to un-customize it. If not, we’ll just have to wait until Google fixes it.
In the meantime, it just seemed to me to go ahead and create a template for purposes of using straight html for the blog posts. The biggest problem is that it will require more work from us to post to the blog, but at least it won’t be a jumbled mess. Hopefully, Google will get it fixed, or we can figure out how to work around it. I’ll do whatever to get things working again, including doing my own HTML, but I would prefer, of course, an easier fix.
Now to be fair to Google, when I signed up for Yahoo! many years ago it was with the understanding that absolutely everything that I signed into, whether it was Groups or Games, or whatever else it is that Yahoo! does, that I was signing in under the same screen name. Google is simply trying to do that. It’s just not what I signed up for.
To be further fair to Google, their online html editor is not the first to crap out on me. I used to blog on My Space, and it was a very simple step by step process to post it, and then one day it was doing odd things with the format. With My Space, I just started blogging elsewhere. With Google, I’ll have to convince Nathan to jump ship with me. Hopefully, there will be a resolution before I have to do that.
Note: I tried using a simple html command separating the paragraph and justifying the margins. It separated the paragraphs by about five lines… and didn’t justify the margins. It actually made it look worse than dumping all of it into the html screen and not doing any formatting.