POP goes the COMMENTS SECTION!

 

Is BLOGGER dying? Who knows, at this point. For some reason, when I was having problems with Google, the page suddenly changed and many features were dropped, and I have not been able to get them back. My son the techie said Google probably isn't supporting Blogger any more BECAUSE IT'S SO OLD! I resented that, mainly because I too am "so old" and not technically proficient at all. 

At the moment, I can only use workarounds. The comments will no longer be visible under the posts, which INFURIATES me because I used to love the long threads of comments which were easy to see. Now you have to click on "comments" and a box comes up. Oh yes, you CAN see the comments, kind of, sort of, but it looks like shit. I don't know yet if I will get an email copy, so I may not even be able to monitor them. Worst of all, I can't edit or delete comments that may be dangerous to leave up. 

It takes something away from the blog that you can't just view the conversations, which sometimes have gone on for years and years. The rare posts that got over 100 comments now don't display them at all. It is all supposed to be there somewhere, but it won't show. A big chunk of Blogger has been cut off and thrown away. If Google does in fact bail on this, it will be the end of a 12-year experience - nay, an ODYSSEY taking me from the callow optimist of 2011 to the cynical, world-weary, but far more realistic person you see today.

SO, if you want to leave a comment and see all the pre-existing comments, click "comments" at the bottom of the post and a box will come up. I hope. I think you have to fill in some idiotic thing like "I am not a robot" (OH REALLY?? I was certain you were!). But for now, that's the best I can do, and the other features missing will have to be worked-around as well. So, beloved readers, hang in with me and I will try not to have a nervous breakdown over all this. Phoooey!

PLEASE STAND BY!

I am having numerous problems with this blog, having somehow lost touch with Google and having to sign in every time I even look at the home page. As it stands, there is a lot in this blog that has been mysteriously disabled, and so far I can't get it back. I am fairly certain the comments section is disabled, as I only get a blank white square where the comments box should be. 

I will likely have to contact Blogger, but last time I did that I got nowhere because I don't "speak computer", and when I try to put it in plain English, they act as if they don't know what I am talking about, or even take shots at me for being ignorant. There are a lot of things that are supposed to show on my home page which now don't, as I can only get the generic home page that other people see, making me sign in 15 times a day and STILL not have the features I need. 

The little symbols on my home page, i. e. the little pencil through which I used to be able to easily edit, is gone, along with all the rest of them. All I can say is, they looked like little wrenches here and there. I don't know what to call these things, but if I refer to the "little editing pencil" or "the little wrenches",  I am told they don't exist and I am speaking gibberish. It is extremely disheartening, not to mention brutal on the self-esteem.

The upshot of it is, I may have to try to manage with a partially-disabled Blogger, with a lot of features vanishing for no discernible reason. The settings are rudimentary (yes, I HAVE tried the settings, Blogger! Don`t  tell me what a "setting" is, because I know!), and most of them are greyed out and can't even be changed. The worst heartbreak for me is apparently losing my comments section, or at least the ability to receive them via email, which I can no longer set up in a blank white box. I very often get comments on ten-year-old posts, but now, if I get them at all, I will never know it, as I can't set up the email feature. It's no longer there.

I love this blog and have kept it for twelve years without any major mishaps. The site has been updated several times, so no, it is NOT a "dinosaur" which is actually obsolete, as I am so often told. I don't want to switch to a more sterile, streamlined blog platform. I like it the way it is. My blog celebrates obsolete technology, along with silent films, old ads, etc., so a slick format would not work at all - and besides, I HATE "slick"! 

I feel pretty obsolete myself right now, and I have no way of telling how to get these features back, if it is even possible. I don't even know why they went away, except that I lost touch with Google for some unknown reason, and my son the techie had to help me get it back. The worst of it is losing my comments, but the box that comes up is now completely blank except for a "SORRY!" Hey, THEY'RE sorry? I'm sorry I even got up this morning. 

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It's the end of an era

 

We-e-e-e-ellll, it's the end of an era for me. YouTube is no longer posting videos directly from the site, and since THAT is where I got them, I'm having to take the long way around. A pain, but that's "progress". Blogger is now a very old and kind of outdated app, and even though I DID update the look of it fairly recently - I don't even know if the saved ones will work now. This is a pain mainly because long entries are kind of sparse now - pandemic has changed everything, including how much time I have to actually write something coherent. The thumbnail at least SEEMS to be correct here - YT has been casually taking them off and putting up random screen-grabs, when I generally put more into my thumbnails than into the videos. So I don't even know if THIS will work any more, and if it doesn't, this blog will have to revert back to still photos and text (as it began!). I guess Blogger is no longer considered "hip" enough, and I am DONE with Facebook, and this time I reeeeally mean it! I am surprised to see at least a fragment of the custom thumbnail here, when it's not showing up anywhere else. YT is "adding" features, meaning it is subtracting others. And all on a November Monday. 

UPDATE. As I look at this, it really looks OK - I just have to take the extra step of copying and pasting the address up top. Actually, it looks a hell of a lot better so far, and I can make it any size, and you can also watch it on YouTube easily. But how I wish they'd warn us about changes, rather than just pulling the rug out from under. They "roll out" changes as if it's some kind of bloody red carpet. Anyway, I seem to be able to watch this, so hope you can too.

"God is dead". . . and so is Blogger?

One of the stranger gifs I've ever found (provenance unknown). So now I get an alarming message from Blogger, which I was afraid would soon be discontinued outright as obsolete technology, telling me that there will be a "new interface" on Blogger as of "late June". 

YouTube has threatened all sorts of dire things over the years, including disabling comments on videos featuring "minors" (in my case, dolls!), and then threatening to shut down channels altogether if they did not designate whether or not the videos are "made for children". All sorts of penalties were waved about for even taking one step in that direction, i. e. featuring a puppy for a few seconds (FOR CHILDREN!), OR, a puppy and a nude woman in THE SAME video (mass confusion and more penalties).

In my case, completely confused and panicked, I agreed to designate one video at a time as "made for children" or "NOT made for children", literally ticking a box for each one, but with an archive of about 2000 videos, I had no idea what to do with all the old ones and was seeing vague threats about having my account terminated forever. I sweated this for a couple of weeks while people posted videos with titles like "IS THIS THE END OF YOUTUBE???!!!" and worse, until the dread moment came, and. . . nothing happened. I mean, NOTHING. 

It was just like the "videos featuring minors" thing - they haphazardly "applied" it to random videos for a few weeks, then dropped the whole thing. In this case, the FTC was after YouTube for allowing companies to access personal information about children, which was ENTIRELY YouTube's fault, but passed along to creators to terrorize them and make sure they knew Who Was In Charge.

This Blogger thing is quite different, or at least I hope it is, an update of sorts, but I want to be able to keep my massive archive, access it easily, and post new things equally easily. The new version of anything is always infinitely harder to use and less effective (as I found out when I was forced to adopt YouTube's new editing program). I can try out the new one, and they do say there will be an option to keep the old "interface", whatever the hell THAT is. 

If the new one is easy to use, updates the look of it a bit (it DOES look very dated, and there seem to be hardly any Bloggers left), then fine. But I dread losing stuff I have lovingly toiled over since about 2011 (!). I just don't want to lose any of it. I DO look for things in my archives several times a week, so if I can't do that without turning it upside-down and shaking it, then I will have to try to stick to the old one. I don't know. But at least there are no dire threats that are never carried out. Yet, anyway.

Meantime, now YouTube is saying "this version of YouTube is going away soon. Try the NEW YouTube!" This is a way to phase out desktop applications entirely, so I will be hanging by a thread once again as some sort of dusty museum piece. 

But for now. . .