Andrea Trasatti's tech notes and more

I have not been able to change the layout of my blogger site for quite a long time. All I could do was download the template, manually edit, re-upload. All the nice AJAXy interface did not work at all.

Today I had a few spare minutes, I went in edit mode and when clicking on preview blogger told me it could not show me the new page because of a (blogger) widget in the head portion of the page. I cut it and magically everything is working! I can now edit the layout again!! woohoo!

I'm glad they added this new error message.

I now replaced the old widget with a cleaner code so that I can get the page titles as I like them. Slightly changed the widgets on the right-hand side of the page (if you are not reading from RSS, of course). Minor link updates.

Now on to work on a couple of posts I've been thinking about in the last few days.

Mike Rowehl has commented negatively about Blogger (and my blog being here) more than once. Anyway he's not the only one, of course.

I have noticed myself more than once, lately, that the site is very often slow and sometimes returns an internal error. Reloading solves the thing most of the times. It seems like some server clusters might have some problems.

The commenting system is not so very well designed. I found myself more than once not being able to publish a comment because there was an error in my message, but the alert was so tiny that I hadn't even noticed it.

I had to hack some widgets and take inspiration from other programmers that built their own widgets such as the tag-blob and the comments widget.

I have considered moving to Wordpress, but when the tags were added to the Blogger, I did not feel the need so much. I think the skins are too limited in their variety (they are mostly color variations), but I can leave with that.

Playing around with RSS has sometimes generated some problems to RSS readers and yesterday has been the latest demonstration of these problems. I added some tags here and there on old posts. Their date has remained 2005 or 2006, but they appear in the RSS as very recent posts (while they are not).

I'm sorry about this, and if you have any formal complaints, please, direct them to the blogger dev-team. :)