Blogger's new post editor

So I was cruising through my options at random after setting up Google's web developer tools so I could get some pageview statistics and shit and I noticed they have a newer post editor.

I typed this post in it.

The first thing I noticed is how fucking sluggish it is.  Text appears in bursts rather than immediately.

They've added a strikethrough button (yay!), but they're still neglecting underline.  What the hell.

There's also a "jump break" button, which I guess would allow me to post a short bit of the post on my main page and then the whole thing is expanded when you view the post by itself.

Their page listing the new features goes into more stuff, most of which is cool like not fucking adding <br /> tags inside the more complex HTML markup like lists and tables, so that you can actually view your markup without it just being a huge word-wrapped jumbled mess.

A new option that I used on this post allows you to control what it does with HTML typed into the WYSIWYG editor.  Either it will interpret it and use it to format your post, or it'll show it literally (basically automatically adding &lt; to it so the tag doesn't get picked up by the browser)

Seriously though, this text burst thing is driving me crazy.  I'm going to switch back to the older post editor just because of it.  I don't know if it's related to the performance of my computer, but an AMD64 3200+ with 2GB of RAM should be able to handle typing a fucking blog post.

One thing I'd love to see is the ability to add custom formatting buttons.  I have some CSS classes set up for things like keyboard keys that when I use them I tend to use them extensively and it means a lot of copying/pasting since I can't just highlight the text and add the style.  It would also be a short term fix for the "lack of underline button" issue. I can do this with Greasemonkey, but that's retarded.

The preview function is better but still far from perfect.  It still doesn't show the post as it would appear on your blog after publishing it.  This means there's still no way to be 100% certain of the appearance of your post until you publish, and then it becomes a game of "edit, publish, read, disapprove, repeat" until you get it looking like you want it to.

Okay, the text burst issue affects HTML mode as well. Definitely switching back to the older editor.  It preserves double spaces now, which is neat.  And it properly escapes HTML entities, which I hated how it evaluated them to the unicode character before so once this annoying text burst thing gets fixed, it'll be a useful editor.

I call it "text burst" but it's more like "input burst" since it affects all keystrokes, not just alphanumerics and symbols.  Trying to move around this post or use Backspace is a real chore.  Given that I'm making lots of typos because text isn't appearing immediately, I'm using Backspace a lot.

Let's try a link and see what happens.  Okay, first off it still doesn't give the option of setting target="_blank" (I added it manually as usual), and second off, typing at the end of the line puts text inside the link tag instead of after it.  Which means wallpaper updates are still going to be a chore since I can't easily add target="_blank" in after the fact either.


(the excessive line break after that is the new editor's fault, not mine. It puts a newline at the end of the link text and another after the closing link tag, then it gets to the one I added.)

At least now it won't fucking timestamp a post until I hit publish, almost all of my posts have an incorrect timestamp because it timestamped them when I started typing them instead of when I finished and hit publish.

Oh and Nekocon report up whenever I get around to taking pictures of the stuff I bought. Which since it's on my mind, will probably be soon. Either that or I'll schedule the post to publish later just to be a dick.

Edit: It fucking removes my custom CSS classes when I switch between HTML and WYSIWYG modes. What the shit.