Optimized

Good heavens. I have been optimized.

 For the last month or so Blogger has been threatening me with a new format. Well, they probably didn’t see it as a threat. They saw it as an Opportunity! See all the new features! Look at all the improved layout! Notice how much more you can do now! You can make your blog do tricks! It can look like different blogs to different people, if you only click this toggle button! Or unclick it. Whichever.

And once again, we are back to the Engineer’s Problem.

Engineers look at gizmos and ask, “How many things can I get this to do?” They want flexibility, capacity, energy. They want a box that can solve all of the world’s problems, fix a tasty meal and tuck your children in bed at night, and they want it with four buttons that need to be pressed in varying combinations and patterns because more than four buttons is aesthetically displeasing.

I look at gizmos and ask, “How can I get this to do what I want?” This is a very different question, with a much more straight-line sort of answer. This is one of the many reasons I did not become an engineer of any kind. Not understanding circuit diagrams despite hours of explanation also figured into that decision.

I had been given the opportunity to “upgrade to the new Blogger interface” a couple of years ago, back when they introduced the last new Blogger interface. I tried it, and decided that it was indeed more flexible, capable and energetic but that those very qualities were a hindrance to me actually getting it to do what I wanted, which was to make blog posts.  Fortunately they had a Back button on the whole thing, so I went back to my old unimproved interface and was happy.

There doesn’t seem to be a Back button this time around.

And getting this post into the proper format has been a neat trick, since my old work-around of pasting Word documents into the HTML editor and then switching over to the Compose mode (to avoid all the formatting tags that Word began to introduce several Blogger upgrades ago) seems to be working extra well these days, to the point of removing all formatting entirely - even paragraph breaks.

Joy.

Eventually, I suppose, I will figure out a way to make this new system do what I want, and perhaps later I will even figure out a way to get it to stop doing what I don’t want. But this hardly seems like the upgrade or Opportunity that Blogger insists that it is.

And fairly soon I am sure the Facebook Borg will assimilate me into Timeline.

Keep those good times rolling, yes indeed.