Blogger Gets Harder to Use

AND IT'S MY FAULT

Sam Beebe/Ecotrust (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The latest casualty in Google's War On Usability is the class of Quick Edit tools that many of us use to maintain our blog and perform other editorial functions.

These are little icons—a pencil, or a wrench crossed over a screwdriver—that linked directly from a post or widget to its respective editing window. Very handy!

So, why did this happen? And, can anything be done about it?

The answer to why is this.

It is my fault.

Update: Google has reversed course on this, at least for now.

On this blog on January 16 I praised the quick-edit tools and cited them as one reason why I was sticking with older blog themes versus newer responsive ones:

The Responsive themes do not support the "quick edit" tools, which let me edit posts and widgets directly from the blog itself. I find this very useful, especially given other recent changes to the blogger back end.

Four days later (yesterday), the option was gone. Since correlation always means causality, you now know whom to blame.

(You'd think I would learn. The digital ink was barely dry on my nine-part series on how to insert images into blog posts when Google revamped the whole look and feel. All those screenshots!)

Perhaps I should just give up blogging about Blogger.

More seriously: can you do anything about this?

A Quick-Edit Workaround

Here's the good news: if your blog theme had these links, they are still present and you can make them visible by adding a few lines of code to your blog via the Customizer.

The bad news is that if you do, everyone who views your blog will see them. The links won't work for them, but the icons will be visible.

The code depends on your blog theme and may not be present. For this one and many of the older themes the code is

.item-control {
display:initial;
}

which clears away a setting that blocks the display of the item.

(Note the double negative, typical of software logic.)

You can add it in the customizer under Advanced > Add CSS—no need to edit your theme xml.

A Better Workaround

It should be possible to restore the link using a browser extension. Only you would see it and the link would still work.

At least for now.

I am working on this. Stay tuned.

Update: Got it.