The Angry Exile: Yet another moan to Blogger

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Monday, 19 September 2011

Yet another moan to Blogger

Both my regular readers (hi Mum) will be aware that lately I've had a few digs at Google/Blogger over its persistent nagging for my phone number to help protect my security and privacy or something. It's something I've bitched about more than once and I've threatened to stop using the service if these regular requests ever become demands or if the rumours that pseudonymous blogging will no longer be allowed. You may be expecting more of the same but actually this is a whole new freshly gleaming turd that the Google dog has cranked out on to my lawn. I'm talking, for those yet to try it, about the new Blogger user interface.

Now I know that it's horses for courses and that some people might really like it, but I don't. I've been in and out of it a few times, having a play around and skipping leaving any feedback on it until I'd made my mind up. And now I've had the chance I've come to the conclusion that it's a good example of form over function and that I don't want anything else to do with it. If you like it knock yourself out, but it's not my cup of tea and when reverting to the old UI just now I clicked the option to leave feedback to explain to Blogger why I didn't like it. At this point I noticed a rather concerning line which said "You can switch back to the current interface for a limited time", which I'm afraid altered the tone of what I had to say:

Why are you switching back?

I don't have time right now to try something new

Some important features are missing

Something important is broken in the updated interface

Other: I hate it

How can we improve our updated interface?What problems did you run into, what features are missing or what new features would you like to see?
No, seriously, I really do hate it. Did you even look at the two side by side? Did you? Let me explain what I mean. The old dashboard had an area on the left about the profile with appropriate viewing and editing links, all labelled in plain English, and a larger though still compact area on the right to manage blogs, again providing all appropriate tools described in plain English: the blog title and number of followers is on one line, a summary of posts and a link to the blog's home page is on the next, and the third starts with a very distinctive 'New Post' button followed by all the other blogging tools you could want. Everything is one click. One click and you're viewing your blog or writing a new post or tweaking the settings or looking at the design layout. And all in strong fonts with a reasonably high contrast making it very easy to read.

Compare this to the new and rather sterile look: the rather skinny fonts often in lower contrast colours making it all harder to read; the odd mixture of buttons with English labels and buttons with new icons and tooltips for people who don't mind mousing over something to see what it does rather than reading it and knowing instantly; the expanse of relative emptiness resulting from the strange decision to hide most functions in drop down menus, one of which is hiding up in a corner; and, when using these drop down menus, the fact that what was a one click process has now become a two click process.

I'm not sure I've explained this all that well but screencaps of the two dashboards should show what I mean. Embiggerise either if you want. First the current UI, which in a wide window sits neatly in the middle with a couple of blank areas either side which are easily ignored. It really is like a dashboard with everything clustered in the same area and divided by function into a few groups. And below is the new one, which ends up being as wide as the window itself because certain elements stick to the left hand edge while others stick to the right. Perhaps this isn't a big deal on a

small monitor, but if you've got a lot of screen real estate sometimes you have your browser window quite large, especially if you've got a lot of tabs open and want to be able to see all or most of them. That's when web pages that attempt to hug both edges of the window become a pain. If you want an extreme example consider both the current and new Blogger UI on a three monitor set up with the browser window stretched across all three screens (yes, I know, I can't think of when you'd want to either, but this is just to illustrate a point). Despite the ridiculously wide window, with the current UI you'd still have the Blogger dashboard sitting roughly in the middle of the centre monitor because it's width and position is fixed - 900 or so px wide (a rough guess, I haven't checked) and centrally aligned. With the new UI you'd have most things over on the left hand monitor and a handful on the right hand side of the right hand monitor, and with a vast electronic wasteland in between. As I say, I can't imagine anyone's normal use would involve stretching a single browser window across multiple monitors but the point is that having elements that cling to both sides can end up looking unwieldy for those who've got the kind of screen real estate to have big windows. And the sort of wide screen HD monitor I'm using right now is, relatively speaking, cheaper than the 19" CRT job we thought were big a decade or so ago.

So I have tried to explain to Blogger.

Since it's known as a dashboard let me draw your attention to the dashboard in your car. I have no idea what you drive but I can make some good guesses about its dashboard. For example, I'd expect that instruments you need to refer to often - speedometer, rev counter, fuel level, coolant temperature, various warning and indicator lights etc - are given prominence and are clustered together in the same place, probably right under your face. Things you want to be handy - radio station, climate control settings and so on - but don't need to see all the time are probably displayed nearby, possibly combined into one up on the top of the centre console. There are plenty of minor variations but I'm pretty damn sure you will not have the speedometer in the middle of the dash, the fuel gauge down by your knee, the rev counter on the far side of the passenger seat and the radio display behind the sun visor. Nor will they display spindly characters in mid grey on a white background.

In summary, and I may have mentioned this, I hate it. The one good feature, the larger post editor, is let down the horribly empty and low contrast look and also by being too large. The old UI looked miles better but just needed to be customisable so that it was the same width as the blog post. It's close on mine but not quite WYSIWYG. The rest, I regret to say, sucks, and I'm not thrilled to see you say at the top that I can only switch back to the better UI for a limited time. Seriously, fellas, the new one is as easy on the eye as John Merrick after a nasty fall down the stairs. If I'm going to have to use it I'd like to have some idea of when so I can shift my blog or find a decent desktop blog publishing app for OS X.

And to top it all off I've tried to send that twice and got an error message both times.

So that's Blogger these days, ladies and gents. Heaps of scope for customising what your blog looks like but you're stuck with their UI even if the new one isn't as good as the old. And despite all the reasons I'm not wild about Wordpress - the lack of customisation and the UI that is less a dashboard than a 747 flight deck instrument panel in the days before glass cockpits - I've taken another step closer to making the switch.