On Blogger's Interface:

I have to give due credit to Blogger for hooking me up with some pretty sweet source material.  Having posted at least one posting in earnest now, I think I am justified to complain at least a little about the UI used to post these blogs we have all come to know and love.  Here goes:

First off, they disabled my spell checking.  but not right and proper, oh no... they got it a little tipsy and then slipped something in its drink on the sly.  Macs have a beautiful built in spell checker (yes, I use a Macintosh and no I'm not gay: I had 13 children thereby affirming my masculinity beyond a shadow of a doubt {also, a whopping  38% of my children survived childhood, which should tell you something about my parenting abilities as an excessively straight male})  This spell checker is one of the reasons I have never bothered to learn to spell.  I had to many important equations to bring to life, and if I can get system wide 

spell checking in my AIM client, why should I waste time learning which words realy have 2 consonants?  Well blogger decided that the world would be better if they went ahead and invented their own "text window" for their blog publishing.  Not only is the window sized to fit the minimum allowed resolution on windows 2000, but its also not a "standard" text window apparently.  My powerbook does its best to continue to spell check as I type, convienently and subtly underlining words that I mispell, but when I go to click on the words that are wrong, the window pops up with suggestions, and then nothing happens.  Somehow blogger managed to block the editing of the words themselves.  Thats quite a feat!

Much to my relief, at least initially, there is a built in spell checker in the entirly too small blogger composition window.  Fine, that will work.  So you click on spell check (of course convieniently displayed as "oh yeah, we got the ABC's Babay!") and the program goes through and highlights all the words I have mispelled in highlighter yellow.  Perfect.  Click on a word, and it gives you suggestions, click on a suggestion, and it fixes the word.  Perfect.  Except for the fact, that once you have clicked on all the words, and have no remaining mispellings, it keeps the friggin thing on???  I have to go back and find a new button that was added just for the sake of spell checking in an entirly different location, and remember to turn it back off.

Despite the fact that it is so easy to leave on, it actually no longer checks spelling when left on.  I can edit text (in fact most of this very posting was done in spell check on mode) but the yellow highlighter no longer shows me I have problems.  Why on earth would I want to leave that on then????? What was wrong with using the same button to enable and disable the spell check, or better yet, why not continue spell checking while you've gone out of your way to inform me that I am not "Done spellchecking" yet??  Thank heavens for OSX for watching my back on this one.  Even if it is slightly inebriated by blogger, its still a little trooper, always watching my back (exept for friggin mouse-keys thank you T. Pate >:-| )

So then I want to upload an image for posting.  I will say it is very convenient not to have to host your own images.  I thank you for that boon blogger.  However, when I select the text area into which I want to insert the images, it lets me add them, and then places them at the top of the post.  I can decide through a dialog box whether I want the images to have left right, or center alignment, or several other options, but apparently it is too much to ask that the images go where the text cursor is.  from there I have to drag the images to the part of the post I want them to appear (I have been informed that on windows you can at least copy and paste, which makes this process easier, but still stupid)  Lastly, apparently you need to be out of spellchecking mode to bring up the images submenu.  Everything else seems to work under spellchecking mode (except of course spellchecking itself) but I need to find the link that says "Done spellchecking" before I could ever imagine being able to add an image (hyperlinks work just fine the whole time by the way)

Of course the windows-esque control shortcuts fail to work on my mac as well (but by now, that's expected :-)