Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.
I despise this new trend, and it kills me that Google seems to be embracing it more and more.
Google Groups is the worst offender for me - it completely breaks my browser's keybindings for going backwards, so every time I'm, eg. searching Googling a bug and open a mailing list archive to find an answer to a bug, I inevitably end up collapsing the thread each and every time, when what I really want is just to go back to the search results. I don't want every Google website to have its own tiling window manager within the page - that's what my OS is for!
Of course, they have no intention of fixing this, it seems. Disabling Javascript just yields an error message - 'Please turn on Javascript to view this page'.
I totally agree. Not only does it disrupt bindings and make pages slow to load, but at least once a day Chrome now freezes when I do a Google search - the results page loads, but I can't click on anything and if I scroll down the bottom of the page hasn't been rendered at all. Nothing for it but to reboot Chrome 3 times (it dies silently the first two).
I still love Google overall (so yay on mailing big files and yay on Gmail generally), but the endless feature creep is a weakness, not a strength.
I have to admit, despite generally being a Google fan, I find a little humor in the fact that my Android phone can't read half their Google blogs. They open, but they won't let me scroll down. I have to stop a page before it loads completely (before it loads SOME element) if I want to be able to scroll. Makes me glad Blogspot is irrelevant to me.
In a discussion about this at work a few months back, someone suggested to me that part of Google's motivation might be to increase the cost of entry for search competitors. No longer can you just scrape a page and index it: not one of the 22 KB served at that URL actually contains the text of the page. To scrape one of those awful pages, you need to JavaScript interpreter and a DOM - a headless browser, really. Unless you're Google: they can just index the back-end directly
I'm not entirely convinced, but I've heard worse conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.
Getting a headless browser up and running really isn't that huge of a hurdle if you're capable enough to build a search engine whose intent is to be competitive with Google.
It's not technically hard, no. However, there's an overhead in running a headless browser, of memory, CPU, time, and bandwidth, so it might cost substantially more.
You don't need a browser for everything, but working out which pages need a headless browser and which you can get away with scraping sounds like an interesting problem.
Try using it on an iPhone, where the site interprets any sort of horizontal swipes (such as ones you might make while zooming in and panning on some text) as an intention to go to the next/previous article in the blog.
They would be better off using Google+ for these announcements anyway. It looks cleaner, they can get a lot of feedback in comments, and they get to further promote Google+, too, as it gets more people used to it.
these blogspot dynamic themes are a pile of turd. they even override some key binds which redirect to other posts. overengineered piece of crap. google groups are barely usable too. haven't used a slower mailing list since I was on dialup. ctrl+click? forget it.
You have to make sure the article body has the keyboard focus first though (e.g. by clicking somewhere on the text); it would be nice if they'd somehow arrange for that to happen by default...
Yeah, it works okay for people who are browsing it on a decent machine with an up to date browser and gives everything else problems. All for little to no gain in functionality, all we really want is a title and some text nicely formatted with a decent font (and these can be easily fixed with readability/ instapaper anyway).
Seems like the wrong direction in an increasingly mobile world, feels like this stuff is either tested on very specific mobile devices or not at all.
When I feel compelled to read such a page, I haul it up from Google's cache. (Firefox has an extension to click-ify that. And, fortunately, Google cache functionality is not all ueber-Javascripted -- yet.)
To cut to the chase: These templates are designed for the sake of Google, not users.
For a start... how about the stupid menu that pops up when I try to use the scroll bar? A stupid menu that actually has an entry titled "Logo", with a "I love blogger" graphic? What the heck is that supposed to mean?
