Saturday, June 12, 2021

Blogger makes itself more difficult -- again

Those of you who write blogs as well as read them have probably shared my frustration with the "new improved" Blogger interface.  For the last year or so, since their last "improvement," it has taken twice as many clicks, or maybe more, to do things that we used to be able to do much more efficiently.  For instance, when I am told on my Reading List page that Uta Lenk has a new blog post, and I click on it, I no longer am taken to her blog.  Instead, I get a message that says: 

What is this nanny warning supposed to save me from?  Would it be so awful if I clicked on Uta's blog when I didn't really mean to?  And then when I got there and realized I didn't want to be there, I could hit the back button?  Why require two clicks when one used to do the trick? 

I have to wonder whether Google has decided that blogs are obsolete, and therefore not worth supporting in the style that we have become accustomed to.   (Blogger is still a pretty decent platform, but it used to be much better, for most of the 12 years I have had my blog.)  I might even think that they're trying to get us to abandon our blogs and switch over to Instagram -- except that Instagram is owned by Facebook. 

So here's the latest development:  Google is discontinuing the Feedburner feature that allows readers to get blogs delivered straight to their email rather than navigating to the internet page.  I think that a lot more of my readers use email delivery than do it the old-fashioned way, so this is a problem.  I would be upset, and I hope you might be too, if suddenly you simply didn't receive your blog and didn't know how to remedy the situation.

I wonder whether other blog owners have made a decision about how to replace Feedburner.  I've received solicitations from an outfit called follow.it, but wonder if there's another alternative that might be better.  Rather than go down the frustrating rabbit hole of internet research, which will certainly reveal that every conceivable competitor is FABULOUS, I will call for help and see if any of you have experience and advice in this area.  Thank you!!

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