Blogger Templates are teh suck
Filed under Intertubes, Software on November 6th, 2007
I’ve seen many pieces of over-engineered and under-delivering stuff on my time (Java Swing comes to mind), but nothing compares to the templating system for the “new” Blogger. Even more so, since templating is something that is supposed to be easy and within the reach of non-technical users.
What we have instead? A mess of XML declarations, incomplete documentation, confusing page element model and obscure error messages.
I finally built my template (almost) the way I wanted, but boy, the fighting with the template system I had to do. And I am a CS graduate with 10 years of experience in all things web. Your mileage may vary. In fact, most people won’t get very far at all.
You believe Wordpress templating is broken? Wait till some merciless fate forces you to work with Blogger templates. You’ll see crazy things, like people resorting to JSON and javascript just to have a “recent posts” on their page. The horror. The horror.
Is it any wonder that most people use the standard Google templates with minimal customizations? Is it any wonder that despise a huge userbase, new blogger templates are few and far between?
Seriously, is this how Google hopes to succeed in the blogging game?
