Back when computers were steam driven and the Earth was forming our lands from molten rock, I played around with MS FrontPage and something called, if memory serves, Hot Press, although I can’t find it mentioned on Google. Creating web pages then was relatively simple, but still involved unexpected results and lots of trial and error. At least it was all in on my PC’s hard drive.
That was ten years ago and since then I have worked abroad in different jobs and haven’t needed to produce on line content, until now. I’ll get into blogging I thought, naively assuming that in those ten years the software would have developed into something simple, something WYSIWYG, fast and intuitive. It’s piggin’ farcical. I’m in Egypt and the connection here isn’t the fastest, a two-minute YouTube video can take 6 minutes to buffer. Trying to create a something on Google’s blogger is a joke. Fonts randomly decide what they are going to look like, backgrounds fail to materialise, pictures won’t go where you want them, appearing with borders or not, depending on the phase of the moon. On a slow connection, this is tediously boring. All this is sortable by trial and error, or by editing the HTML code or doing something with CSS or just deciding it’s good enough.
Ten years on, why is it so fiddly and frustrating? It’s free of course, but then I wouldn’t want to have to pay for the privilege of trying to figure out such an unfriendly, unwieldy interface. I can get it looking sort of like my ideal, but it’s a slow and annoying process or maybe I’ve just got old and my youthful mental agility has rusted with the passing of the years. I don’t believe it has to be this complicated. Ten years on things should have moved forwards, not sped backward to an age of darkness. It’s as if DOS 3.0 replaced Windows 8. I half understand why it’s like this, it needs to work on different platforms, on different screens, on different everything but I’m not interested. I want a solution to my blogging needs, not a solution that creates more problems than it solves. Not in other words, the sort of solution that would be favoured by civil servants and government ministers.
Enlightened, independent enterprises the size of Google should be able to do better. Well that’s that over.
Perhaps a tad harsh, but really why is the process of posting some text with a few images so tricky?
That was ten years ago and since then I have worked abroad in different jobs and haven’t needed to produce on line content, until now. I’ll get into blogging I thought, naively assuming that in those ten years the software would have developed into something simple, something WYSIWYG, fast and intuitive. It’s piggin’ farcical. I’m in Egypt and the connection here isn’t the fastest, a two-minute YouTube video can take 6 minutes to buffer. Trying to create a something on Google’s blogger is a joke. Fonts randomly decide what they are going to look like, backgrounds fail to materialise, pictures won’t go where you want them, appearing with borders or not, depending on the phase of the moon. On a slow connection, this is tediously boring. All this is sortable by trial and error, or by editing the HTML code or doing something with CSS or just deciding it’s good enough.
Ten years on, why is it so fiddly and frustrating? It’s free of course, but then I wouldn’t want to have to pay for the privilege of trying to figure out such an unfriendly, unwieldy interface. I can get it looking sort of like my ideal, but it’s a slow and annoying process or maybe I’ve just got old and my youthful mental agility has rusted with the passing of the years. I don’t believe it has to be this complicated. Ten years on things should have moved forwards, not sped backward to an age of darkness. It’s as if DOS 3.0 replaced Windows 8. I half understand why it’s like this, it needs to work on different platforms, on different screens, on different everything but I’m not interested. I want a solution to my blogging needs, not a solution that creates more problems than it solves. Not in other words, the sort of solution that would be favoured by civil servants and government ministers.
Enlightened, independent enterprises the size of Google should be able to do better. Well that’s that over.
Perhaps a tad harsh, but really why is the process of posting some text with a few images so tricky?
No comments:
Post a Comment