Bad Idea #117: Blogging Software That Fails Us
This morning at early o'clock I realized the paradigm shift introduced by blogging software has come full circle. Current blog software no longer serves the market it created.
How did I come to realize this? By blogging, of course. I decided to write a piece about David Beckham, the point of which is that he is earning my respect and perhaps even a place as a role model through his workman like effort to play for AC Milan on loan. Naturally I found interesting quotes, detail, links and a picture to include in the article. It may even make good reading. However as I attempted to get the article into the webpage, several things happened:
- Every time I published the article, the paragraph breaks were lost. Thus going back to correct or add to the article means reformatting the whole thing.
- Midway through trying to insert a picture the online software hung, and I lost the entire article. Luckily I had pre-written a lot of it in plain text in Notepad.
- After inserting a picture, I tried to fix the paragraph breaks, backspacing to delete, and with a single backspace the entire post was deleted (again).
- Giving up on re-creating all the fascinating links I'd inserted, I published the article. Upon publishing I see formatting errors, and spelling errors, but I dare not edit the post for fear of losing all the paragraph breaks, or worse, the entire article.
I am not the first person to blog. In fact there are probably 200 million blogs worldwide. So other people have figured out how to avoid these problems - presumably, or at least work around any software idiosyncrasies so that they preserve their mental health. Blogging has become a respected source of news and information, it is the new distributed press of the world.
If a blogger is more than a hobbyist and trying to do a professional job, should they put up with the errant software behavior enumerated above? I cannot imagine a newspaper of any renown tolerating tools which fail to produce professional looking copy from text and content.
Perhaps the problem lies in the architecture of popular blogging software, or in its extensible nature, or in the fact that the software is currently provided more or less free of charge. Having created this fantastic information marketplace called the blogosphere, perhaps one or more of those things should change.
Imagine some math: 100 million bloggers wasting 10 hours a month due to poor software. The billion hours that could be saved with better software would be sufficient to build new pyramids, or perhaps solve some of the world's pressing problems like hunger, global warming, or economic growth.
Perhaps complex professional software should not be written in PHP.
