Oh Hi There

So, Twitter's had these things called Twitter Cards for a while now.  You've probably already seen them in action.  When you post a link to a website, there will be a box with information about the link as opposed to just a plain link.  That's the Twitter Card, and it's dead simple to implement.

It's all in your page's <meta /> tags.  I'm not going to go in-depth describing how to do it here, because Twitter's got a whole section of their developer site for that.  There's a bit of finagling to get it working on Blogger since you have to edit your template, and if you want to customize them at all you'll end up having to learn Blogger's template language.  Thankfully, it's XML-based, so it's not completely terrible.

Blogger's template language isn't without its shortcomings, though.  The vast majority of the data you might want to work with is only available to specific page widgets.  For instance, on the Twitter Card for my blog's archive pages (click a year or month header in the archive section to get one such page), I wanted the title to just be my blog title, and the description to say something like "Post archive for $MONTH $YEAR".  While there's a way to get the date of the archive, it's only available within the archive widget itself, and not available to the whole page, even when the page is an archive page.  I had to settle for leaving the archive's date in the title and just putting "Post Archive" in the description.

Also, their template language completely barfs all over the place if you have the nerve to try and prepend a string to a data variable.  Appending works beautifully, but prepending causes the whole thing to fail.

Now, in any other language, I'd just go "oh, well, the page title contains the archive's date, I can just test for page type, and if it's an archive page, use string functions to pull the archive's date out of the title and stick it in the description instead!", but we don't get anything nearly as fancy as that here.  I'm basically stuck with what I've got until their template system gets more powerful.

Theoretically I could submit feedback about this, but the trouble with that is, this is Google we're dealing with.  I'm not going to get a response.  In all reality, I'll be completely ignored.  They're not going to implement some random suggestion that one guy would find useful; they'll only implement what they come up with because then it's "cool".

Anyway, when I link my new posts on Twitter, they'll now have Twitter Cards instead of just being plain links.  This change doesn't seem to apply retroactively, so don't go looking through my old tweets for it.

RIP My Computer 2004-2016

So my old dinosaur of a computer started randomly rebooting a few days ago.  At first I thought it was something software-related, because it took 15 minutes or so to happen.  But then it started happening even from the BIOS setup menu, and now if I turn it on it just reboots continuously.  This means there's something fucked up in the hardware and there ain't shit I can do about it.

I guess solving my unemployment issue just got a bit more important.  Luckily, I won't actually lose any data since the hard drives are totally fine.  I just need to pull them out, put them in my 3.5" drive enclosure, and pull whatever I need off of them.

I'm posting from a laptop we acquired from my granddad a while back when getting old finally got severe enough that he couldn't really use a computer anymore.  I don't remember if I've mentioned this laptop on this blog before, but the sad thing is that it's better than my old desktop.  I mean, it still has the vast majority of the HP crapware on it, but I cleaned up the most severe offenders that were bogging the thing down and the only bits that remain are just installed programs that never get run.  I'm about this close to reformatting it and putting Ubuntu on it, to be honest.

So, why does Blogger in Chrome do double spaces as <space><non-breaking space>?  In Firefox it does <non-breaking space><space>, which is the correct way to do it so that blog posts won't end up with weird word wrapping issues.  I have to copy and paste every post I write into Notepad++ and do a find/replace to swap them, and it's super annoying.

Chrono Trigger DS Sidebar Update

Since everyone's maxed out, the table was just a bunch of zeroes and stars.  So, I've changed it to reflect what I'll be working on with a lower priority than Bravely Default SCIENCE! and Chrono Cross: the six items found exclusively in the Arena of the Ages.

Once again, I've played around with the CSS, partly to stroke my own boner, and partly to get around Blogger's own boner-stroking and a CSS nuance.  The list of items is an unordered list, with the normal bullets hidden and the Unicode "empty checkbox" and "checked checkbox" characters placed in front via CSS classes.  However, I had to get around a CSS nuance in that placing the HTML entities for those characters in the content rule of the li:before just caused the entity text to be printed literally instead of being properly interpreted as an entity.  My first attempt at addressing that was just to copy and paste the actual characters into my CSS, but Blogger decided to be helpful and turned them back into entities, which got printed literally.  So, stackoverflow to the rescue, and I'm using regular old C-style escape sequences.

I mean, yes, I could just stick the character, or the entity representation thereof, in front of the text and just use a bunch of <br /> tags.  But that's not how I roll.

Anyway, since I mentioned Bravely Default SCIENCE!, I might as well say that the first thing up is a bit of an in-depth look into what affects the power of the Rejuvenation special move, with the goal of getting the number on the sent move to be as high as possible.  Even though the amount will be recalculated on the recipient's side and they won't see the full number without perfectly replicating the setup used to generate it.  If I had a second 3DS and a second copy of Bravely Default, I could test what actually does get transferred...

Seeking a Real Solution

So I just accidentally deleted all my flash game saves again.  This so happens to include saves for Steam games written in Flash, like Machinarium, TRAUMA, and The Binding of Isaac.

I'll definitely re-hack BetterPrivacy again, but that's only a temporary solution in that it only affects me.  The real problem, as I've stated before, is that the mass deletion confirmation dialog is completely unintuitive.

This has to stop.  I've just submitted a bug report on the author's website, we'll see what happens.

Also, while it's on my mind, I'll bring it up.  Blogger really needs an easy way to cross-reference a previous post.  To do so I have to open another tab, go to my list of posts, find the one in question, copy the link, and paste it into the "create link" dialog in the post I'm working on.  There's all that empty space in the column on the right that plays home to all the post settings, they could stick it there.

lol

So, I've been playing around with the Twitter feed in the sidebar over there.  I think I'm done now.

I had briefly updated the Blogger-approved Twitter widget to its most recent version, but it had that annoying "add this to your blog" image at the bottom that I couldn't get rid of and had tooltip text in some other language.

I don't know why I didn't know about this sooner, but Twitter has an official widget thing.  Which is what you see now.  I guess it's because of the fact that since I use TweetDeck, I don't regularly visit twitter.com anymore.

I sincerely hope that this one will show retweets...

Also, just because I am who I am, I grabbed a copy of the widget Javascript that the widget remotely loads from Twitter's server, and put it up on my site, where it won't ever change except when I want it to.  So there won't be any unexpected "congratulations, this thing now looks and/or operates different(ly) and you have no option of going back to how it used to be" bullshit.

The Future of Wallpaper Updates

Since I'm taking in wallpapers at a much slower rate than I was, the updates are naturally becoming less and less frequent as well as smaller in size.

I've had some ideas as to how to keep them alive, but as I've previously mentioned, making each one is a giant hassle.

My ideas (well, my idea, I only had one) was to change them from wallpapers I use from series I've seen or am currently watching, to simply wallpapers from currently airing and recent series, whether or not I've been watching the series or use the wallpapers I post.  The trouble with doing that is having to go out of my way to obtain wallpapers from a series I'm not even interested in.  I'd have to use a second Picasa account to hold them since I want my main one to be for wallpapers I actually use (and the other random pictures posted on this blog).

What I really want to do is just stop doing them altogether and simply recommend that you make use of the RSS feed for my Picasa account to see new wallpapers as I add them.  That way I can go on my merry little way and add wallpapers as I find them, and you can just ignore the ones you don't want.  I'm also half tempted to look through the blogger gadgets thing and see if there's something I can stick in the sidebar to show thumbnails of the last few images I added to the account.

So, yeah. (I use the phrase "So, yeah." a lot on this blog, don't I?)

Edit: Well, there is indeed a gadget to show recently added pictures on a Picasa account, but it's not showing mine.  Maybe it has a hidden unconfigurable timeframe that it only looks inside for pictures.  Being that the dates on my albums are used solely to force them to be sorted alphabetically, that won't work.  I should try uploading an image just to see what happens.

Edit 2: Okay, I uploaded a random picture of Stocking from Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt that I found that happens to be 1600x1200, and it's not showing up.

Edit 3: Yeah, it's most likely got a hidden unconfigurable date threshhold.  The RSS feed for my Picasa account is fucked up since I messed with the album dates so they would sort alphabetically.  Each picture has its own upload date, but Picasa seems to cheerfully ignore that.  Useless.

Edit 4: I might as well link you to the image I uploaded.  Here you go.  Slightly NSFW, but when was the last time anyone cared about that?

Small tweak

The MAL signature image will now finally remember its show/hide state across page loads.  The reason I hadn't had this functionality in there to begin with is because Blogger restricts your use of certain bits of Javascript functionality, as well as your ability to load external scripts.  I found a way around it, so now the feature can happen.

I can understand them wanting to restrict those bits of functionality, but at the same time, this is a completely benign use of said functionality, so it annoys me that they don't at the very least have an API to do it.

I'm skirting around mentioning exactly what's restricted and how I got around it on purpose, but it's not too hard to figure out.

So, yeah.  XT-8147: 1; Blogger: 0.

Of course, it only works properly in standards-compliant browsers.  I haven't tested it, but it should fall back to the old functionality in lesser browsers.  It may generate errors in the process, I don't care.

In other news, YouTube thinks I'm 109 years old and I'm unable to change this.  I probably gave a fake birthday on account creation, but the absence of a way to change it mystifies me.

Greasemonkey Blogger Navbar tweaks

So, I took it into my own hands to add some links to the navbar that Blogger hasn't yet.

It turns out that they do in fact have a Dashboard link on the navbar, but it's mystery meat.  See that B logo in the top left corner?  Yeah, that's it.  Even worse, the tooltip that comes up to explain it says "Go to Blogger.com" instead of "Dashboard".  Could that BE any less descriptive?

Now my navbar has both a clearly labelled Dashboard link, and a link to the new Spam inbox so I can easily review any comments marked as spam.  Also, that lets me access the comment moderation, which in Blogger's infinite wisdom has to be ON for the spam inbox to be accessible.

The script detects whether you have Blogger in Draft enabled and modifies its links accordingly.  Really only one link needs to be modified, because the Dashboard link is relative and their server figures it out automagically.  It actually says www.blogger.com/home when I mouse over it, but when I click it, I get the Blogger in Draft dashboard.

I guess I should host the script somewhere so anyone else who wants it can have it.  There's nothing in it that makes it blog-specific, I've tested it on both of my blogs (even though I don't use Random Bullshit anymore, I don't seem to be able to import its posts here and remove it...)

YAY, FORFUCKINGFINALLY

BLOGGER NOW HAS A COMMENT SPAM FILTER

FUCK YOU CHINA

Edit: What the hell, it was there long enough for me to flag some comments as spam, and now it's gone.  Random Bullshit still has it, but THE BLOG THAT ACTUALLY FUCKING NEEDS IT doesn't. What the fuck.

Edit 2: Oh, I see.  It's Blogger being counter-intuitive again.  You have to have comment moderation on to be able to access it.  So basically I can't have the best-of-both-worlds solution, where legitimate users can post unencumbered and shithead spammers get filtered.

Crucial Blogger Shortcomings

The following are all sorely needed:

• A "Report Spam" link on every comment left on a blog post
• Captcha forced for blog authors as well
• A comment spam filter (8/13/2010: IT EXISTS NOW YAY)
• Links to moderated commenters' profiles from the comment moderation panel.  Also, a link to their blogs, when applicable.  The emails it sends about moderated comments have profile links...
• A link directly to the dashboard from the navbar even when you're looking at your own blog
• The Quick Edit link in a post should use Blogger in Draft if the user has it enabled
• Templated HTML for inserting an image into a post
• Ability for custom theme CSS to use theme variables
• Toggle for target="_blank" on links
• Ability to add extra formatting buttons that apply custom CSS classes to post content via span tags
• A setting to specify custom CSS to be loaded in the post editor, for use with custom CSS classes applied to post content via span tags
• The Twitter gadget needs to show retweets and link whatever #thesearecalled
• A proper trackback system compatible with other blog software
• The post preview click catching element needs to be positioned with position: fixed; rather than position: absolute;, and the diagonal "Preview" text should be below it, not above it.
• Tweaks to the editor so that pressing Enter has the desired effect on the first try, and to eliminate the space it puts at the end of a line.
• Ability to preview the short version of a post using a jump break
• Post editor formatting button for underline
• Some emoticons or something (should be the same height as the text so they don't mess with line spacing)

Marathon Frontier

Marathonned Macross Frontier.  It was really good.  It's one of those ones that even though it's really good, there's so many reasons that you can't really put your finger on any one specific one and say "that's the reason this series is good".

I lol'd at them basically producing Macross Zero at one point.  That was hilarious.

I don't really have a good screencap like I did for F/SN.  I'd planned on posting that picture, whereas here there wasn't really anything that I could screencap as I watched (it's not like I watch with my finger hovering on the save screencap key).

There was a temporary panic when I went to watch the series and noticed I was missing episode 18.  Luckily, I found the batch torrent from the group I'd gotten it from (anyone remember Menclave?), pointed it at all my complete files, and got episode 18 within an hour or so.  The significance of episode 18 and why I'd be missing it is simple.  Since I set up automated downloads using Azureus' RSS Feed plugin, I'd had it properly configured to get the episodes.  But between episode 17 and episode 18, Gekkostate left the joint project, so my filter no longer matched.  I guess I didn't notice until episode 19 came out, what with Menclave's slow releases and all.

Next up... I guess Rozen Maiden desu.

Also, my strict comment moderation settings caught some chinese linkspam.  Unfortunately, from the comment moderation panel, there's no way to get to a user's profile and then their blog, so it's useless for reporting the fuckers.  Another thing Blogger needs to fix.

Oh hey, wallpapers...

I was just looking at my unsorted directory and noticing I've accumulated a bunch.  Since I'm not actively browsing /w/ anymore, the influx of wallpapers has gone down.  In fact, most of the recent ones were actually from Sankaku Channel, especially the large scans that I just downscaled to 2000 pixels wide so they'd be reasonable internet uploads.  This update is entirely Railgun and K-ON!!, so...  yeah.

Anyway, to business.  "TO BUSINESS!"

I used the Blogger In Draft image thing for this, that's why it looks a bit different from my previous wallpaper updates.  Predictably, I had to edit all of the markup it inserted to allow more than one image on a line (WHAT A CONCEPT) and to add target="_blank".  Also, in true Blogger style, it doesn't have an option for the thumbnail size that using the "Link to this image" feature on Picasaweb gives you, so instead of having four images per line it's three.  Inserting the images was easier, but since there's still editing to be done, I think I'll go back to just copy/pasting the linking markup out of Picasaweb.  This new image thing is yet another typical "one step forward, two steps backwards" "solution".

I Hate WYSIWYG Interfaces

I've voiced my discontent with them before, especially Blogger's post editor, but while editing posts recently a number of issues have come to light that I need to bitch about.

WYSIWYG interfaces never seem to leave user-written markup alone.  They have their own idea of how it should look, and enforce this every step of the way.  Unfortunately, they always result in adding stuff that shouldn't be there, and generally cause a headache multiple times per use.

We Are The Waiting...

Seriously, W3C...  When will CSS3 be finalized?  It's got a ton of extremely awesome stuff that I can't wait to play around with in a standardized manner.

Most browsers have implementations of the proposed CSS3 selectors already, hidden away with selector names beginning with a hyphen and a browser or renderer-specfic string.  Firefox uses -moz, the webkit renderer uses -webkit, and Opera being weird like usual uses -o for some things but not others.

I've only ever used the border-radius ones (see the header above if you're not using IE (and why the hell would anyone ever use IE)).  Rounded borders used to only be possible with images (eats up memory) or Javascript hacks (which eat up CPU time and memory), so having a standard way of doing rounded borders that the renderer can do with native code will be faster and less resource-intensive.

One of the biggest and best things is CSS fonts.  It will be (and technically is already in most browsers) possible to provide the font you want your page to be viewed in, and define things like the default size and family name so forth so you can just use it in font-family like any other font already installed on the user's system.  In before web pages that use all sorts of crazy hard to read fonts.  In all seriousness, it's a nice feature and real web developers who actually have the viewing experience in mind will use it properly.  I can't say as much for your average 13 year old who just discovered HTML and CSS.

One of the neatest things I see is the proposed border-image-slice selector.  This lets you make an image to be used for the border of an element, and define where the corners are, where the middle is (which would get cut out by the renderer if you allow it to) and stretch the middle edges vertically and horizontally to fit the rendered width and height.  Previously you needed eight separate images to do this, and with CSS3 you'll be able to do it with one.

There's also better control of using images with the regular border selectors.  You'll be able to control whether it's stretched or tiled and so forth.

There's more than just borders and fonts, you'll be able to do shadows, two-dimensional transformations such as rotate and skew (blogger uses rotate in its post preview, it's pretty neat and would have required an image without this), and gradients.

The aim of CSS3 seems to be reducing page load times and resource usage on the user's computer while providing better control over what they see.  And I like that.

Blogger progress

I noticed a couple days ago that the awesome preview feature that — get this — actually shows you exactly what your post is going to look like when you hit publish got moved over from Blogger in Draft.  It still has the bug where their element they place over the page to prevent you from clicking anything is positioned using position: absolute; rather than position: fixed; and thus scrolls with the page instead of staying in place, but maybe, hopefully, they can fix that.  If they don't, there's always Stylish.

What I didn't notice until just now is that "Customize" in the navbar has changed to "Design" and that the new template designer has also been moved over.  Going through it, I notice a spot for custom CSS, which is basically exactly why I ever used Edit HTML in the first place.  Funny little thing about using Edit HTML: if the template you're using gets updated, you don't get those updates.  I suspect that's what's lead to my headache with the things at the bottom of all my posts not showing up correctly.

So over the course of the next few days, if this blog looks radically different, I've been playing with the template designer.  Now that there's an easy way to get the look I want, I might as well use it, right?  Right?  I certainly hope there isn't some hidden drawback.  You can even adjust the width of your blog in it, which I had added a custom template variable to do so it was easily changeable and I didn't have to put the same value in five different places or whatever.

This place has needed a bit of a redesign anyway.  It's had a black background, red lines, grey text, and white links since, well, since I created it.  I've gone over two years with the same theme, so it might be time for a change.

Wonder when the new post editor will get moved over.  Its image management is way better and should make wallpaper updates a ton easier to do.  And when will they be adding the ability for us to make our own post editor tool buttons so we can easily apply custom CSS to content in our posts?

Edit: I transferred the blog over to the new template editor and pasted in all my old custom CSS.  It should look and function exactly like it did before, except now I can use the new template editor to change things.  Also, the stuff that should be at the bottom of each post is there once again, which is awesome.  I hate that custom CSS doesn't have access to the template variables (which act more like constants, but whatever), but maybe if we ask Google really nicely they'll change that?  Also, I can probably use jump breaks now.

Edit 2: or can custom CSS use template variables?  I just looked in Edit HTML, and I found my custom CSS.  Hmm.  They probably sanitize them if found, just to be annoying.

Edit 3: well, it didn't get sanitized, but it also appears to not be parsing it.  A big middle finger to you, Google.

Edit 4: I had to add an XSS protection exception to NoScript so that the layout editor would work properly.  If this is affecting any random person reading this, the line to add is: ^https?://[^\.]+\.blogspot\.com/b/preview

Edit 5: issue and solution reported on NoScript's forums.

Blogger In Draft

Overall it's nice, and the actual real post preview feature needs to be implemented in the regular post editor immediately.

Albeit with one tweak.

Their "click trap" element they overlay on the post so that you can't click any of the links or anything in the preview window is positioned with absolute positioning instead of fixed positioning.  Meaning if the post preview has any vertical scroll whatsoever, the region below the first screenful isn't click-trapped.  Simply changing position: absolute; to position: fixed; will fix this issue entirely.

Also if the new post editor would stop adding spaces to the end of every single line, that would be awesome.  This happens both in the Blogger In Draft editor and the regular one.  Seeing as how the only way to get the Blogger In Draft editor is to go back out to the Dashboard and then enter Edit Posts from there.  That needs fixing too, if I've enabled Blogger In Draft, I should be able to use its features without having to go to the dashboard first.

And when will we get Dashboard and Edit Posts links at the top of our own blogs?

Edit (9:16 PM): One thing I just noticed is the ability to add images directly from your Picasa account.  I guess now I'll have to do another wallpaper update just to try it out.  Once I get a couple more wallpapers and do the one or two detexts I need to do, we'll see.

Chinese Spammers GTFO my blog

Seriously.  I delete your comments.  You're also the reason why any comment on a post that's more than a day old gets moderated.

I want to eventually have people comment on a somewhat regular basis.  This is really hard because I don't have a set theme or topic, but it'd be nice.  Spam comments are absolutely meaningless to me.  They don't make me feel better about what I posted, they don't provide additional insight, etc.  They're just wasting space on the internet.

Blogger could make some changes to their commenting controls.  Currently the options are:

• Anyone - includes Anonymous users
• Registered Users - includes OpenID
• Users with Google accounts
• Only members of this blog

I have it set to Registered Users.  I also have the captcha enabled, but it's pointless because blog authors are exempt from it and every spammer that's ever commented has an empty blog for the sole purpose of getting around the captcha without even having to try.

I get spam followers on Twitter as well.  I'll go on Twitter and notice that my number of followers has gone up from three, then look at the page of my new follower and surprise, every single post is a headline and a shortened URL.  The shortened URLs are usually through a URL shortener that displays an interstitial ad before redirecting you to where you actually want to go, so I don't even dignify them with clicks to see what they're posting about (even though I won't see the ad anyway, /hug AdBlockPlus).

Every spam follower I've gotten has been blocked and reported for spam.

Once again, I'd love for real, live people to follow me on Twitter.  Three real live people do in fact already follow me on Twitter.  I know they're real because:

• Their posts don't all conform to the same format.
• They post stuff about what's happening, which is what Twitter's actually for.
• I know all three of them in real life (and I'm following them).

So, yeah.  In short, reiterating a point you know very well by now if you've read any of my posts here: I hate spam.  The meat is fine.  The unsolicited internet communications, not so much.

This Just In: Free Stuff is Hard to Resist

So in case you've been living under a rock, you probably know that Valve released Steam for the Mac earlier this month.  To celebrate, there's a special deal.  Portal is free.

Yeah, I know I'm about the last person in the world to post about this.  Whatever.

I love puzzle games and had wanted to play Portal at some point, but never really had the money to get it (unemployment ftl).  But since it was free and legit, why not?

Since getting it I've beaten it four or five times.  For a game that's as good as it is, it's pretty short.  I've got all the achievements I really care to get.  Basically all of the ones you can get playing the game normally, and the achievement for finishing two of the advanced levels.  I might do the rest of the advanced levels, but it'll take some time.  The challenges I might do (I have bronze on one of them, for doing level 13 in 9 portals, and I know how I can shorten it by at least couple more), but it's not my top priority.

All of the achievements except for Camera Shy and Transmission Received I got on my first playthrough.  My second playthrough I went for Camera Shy and somehow came up two fucking cameras short.  On my third playthrough I got that as well as Transmission Received.

Earlier I was playing around with the console, giving myself all the Half-Life 2 weapons (despite not actually owning HL2), getting the upgraded portal gun early, having fun with noclip, etc.  I noclip'd my way to the room with the cake (and companion cube) in it that you see at the end, as well as the outside world area they have for that one scene.  It's kind of weird, the cake makes metal noises if you hit it with the crowbar.  Also, if you move the companion cube, it doesn't move it back before the end cutscene.  Just for kicks I noclip'd to the top of the shaft that you fly down just before seeing the cake in the cutscene and grabbed the chair on one of the ledges.  Put it by the table with the cake.  Yeah, noclip is fun.  Though you do have to watch how you use it, or you could end up like this guy.

Portal is pretty good, and it's still free until the 24th, so if you don't have it, grab it while you can!

On a side note, I would love to use a jump break but Blogger isn't putting the "click here to continue reading" link in the post.  It still properly does the jump break, but...  yeah.  Also, I swear that I enabled the thing at the bottom of the post that says "Posted by XT-8147" but it's not showing up.  Blogger's full of bugs in that area, on Random Bullshit I disabled the comments link early on in the setup, and re-enabled it later but it never showed up.  Reactions haven't worked in either place.  What the fuck.  Do they even test their features?

For Future Reference

For whatever reason I don't want to play any more Chrono Trigger without at least documenting the amount of game time it took me to get everyone to Level **.  So here are pics.  Therefore it happened.

I've got a rather in-depth post queued up about how exactly I went about doing this, and how I made all the boss fights really fucking easy.  Here's a hint: I'm not on New Game + yet.

This is the first barrier to being able to get all the endings. The other (comparitively minor) barrier is maxing out everyone's Power, Magic, and Speed.

The last good portion of this post is about Blogger.

The issues I was having with Blogger's new post editor (regarding input lag at least) are gone entirely.  I dunno if my computer was loaded down (Firefox likes to randomly use 100% CPU after a while) or what, but the editor's working perfectly fine now.  It also autosaves a lot faster after I stop typing than the older editor did, which is really nice.

Blogger also now has "pages", which are basically custom static pages.  I get 10 of them, I've used two so far.

The one thing I don't get: Why doesn't the post editor use the same font that my blog's theme uses?  Wouldn't that make the WYSIWYG view actually live up to its namesake?

Some other posts that I'll be posting in the near future:

• Maybe something about Guitar Hero, though I've got a Blogger page for summary stuff now.
• A post about Vib Ribbon (Japanese music game with infinite levels — literally)
• Recent CAINE shenanigans (there's always something fun)
• Another recent anime post (hints: Railgun, Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu)
• Another wallpaper update, maybe (I'm getting tired of managing my Picasa account, and constructing the updates has always been a chore)
• If I can get the game working again, A Classic DOS Games post about The 11th Hour

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.