Monday, April 09, 2007

blogger sucks!

If I enter "a < b" in blogger then it works, but if I want the < symbol to be next to some other text (EG for a #include line in C source) then it treats it as a HTML tag. The HTML code for a < symbol also doesn't work. This doesn't work regardless of whether I try entering HTML in the HTML editor or entering text in the "Compose" editor. I could deal with this problem if it forced me to strictly use one of the two editors available, but it fails in both!

Do other blog server programs have problems like this? I think that I need to change my blog server just to allow posting C source!

Also do any of the common blog servers allow a file upload? For most of my posts I do all the editing offline, so I'd rather just upload a HTML file instead of pasting the text into the blog editor (and then manually fixing the situations where it's idea of formatting differs from mine). If such an upload mode also supported getting a file via HTTP then that would be convenient too. The option of editing a file on a remote server with vi, exporting it via Apache, and then getting it to the blog server via HTTP would work well for me in some important situations.

Update: It sucks more than I thought. The feed misses the "less than" character between "a" and "b" in the above paragraph. My list of requirements in this regard now includes the ability to use such characters in a feed. Actually I want to go the whole hog and be able to include samples of HTML in my blog entries and have them display correctly in the feed.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pyblosxom might do what you want. Setting up's a bit of a pain, but the posts for the blog are housed in flat text files (so you can do HTML if you like).

http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/

Unknown said...

Using blosxom (or, as chris suggested, pyblosxom) works pretty well. I've got a version control system set up that will trigger a rebuild of the blog after a commit, so I can write the post offline and commit it when I get online.

If you don't want to run your own server for your blog, then using livejournal with something like logjam will do what you want; logjam is a GTK+ client for livejournal-like blog engines, which also allows you to write entries offline, and livejournal does not suck with regards to stuff like < and >

Anonymous said...

Yeah, now it's the end of 2008 and Blogger still sucks.

I just switched away from blogger. Why I switched and why I picked Squarespace as the alternative you can read here.

It does cost money, but it's worth it. Typepad and Wordpress look very good too; of course both cost money if you don't host it yourself.

P.S. No I'm not some shill for Squarespace. I work at the company I founded.