Puzzling interface hall of shame

Blogger's back end (at www.blogger.com) includes some quirks that are confusing at best.

A worst, they could cause you to make errors that cannot be undone.

Permanently delete

I'll start with a particularly bad one: the screen you get when you delete a blog:

Actually, you only see this if the blog is deleted.

I don't mean "you" of course, since you know to never delete a Blogger blog.

But someone else might come to regret deleting their blog, especially when they discover that doing so does not make the blogspot web address available for reuse.

And if that person were to click "delete permanently," they'd discover that undelete is no longer an option. The blog would really be deleted permanently, and the URL could never be reused.

Autoclick

Take a look at that screen. It looks like the kind of interstitial "are you sure, please confirm" screen we routinely see online. It feels like "Do you really mean it? If you do, click again!"

Many click the "permanently" button automatically.

However, this is actually the screen you get after you are successful in deleting a blog. "Permanently delete" and "undelete" are the two things you can then do with the deleted blog, at least for a few months.

You can't come back from "permanently."

Fail.

No theme preview

This one is really more of an annoyance born from poor explanation. 

If you ever make even the slightest modification to your blog theme, you will see this message on your Theme page:

Doesn't this feel like something is broken?

The wording suggests there is a live preview that is being blocked by some problem that Google needs to fix.

The truth is that there never was such a preview of your blog, just a static image of each unmodified version of the blog theme.

Blogger doesn't know if your change is even a visible one, just that you did something. That image might longer apply. 

To be safe, Blogger shows you the generic message instead of the generic image.

Live previews of your personal blog, on the other hand, are available (1) for posts and pages, and (2) in the theme customizer and the theme HTML editor.

But on the theme page, things would be clearer if the message were "Customized themes are not previewed."

Or just nothing at all.

Customizer

Speaking of the Theme Customizer, navigating it is a minor nightmare.

Click to navigate the Customizer.

You can access the Customizer from your Theme page to change things like font size, color, and selection. Also backgrounds and column widths.

Different blog themes have different options. But the trick is to click on the little grey chevrons and triangles, and use the scroll bars, to choose the customizable attributes.

It's easy once you know, but not at all obvious.

Alignment confusion

If you are having trouble aligning your images left, right, or centered, the problem may lie with this little tool:

Center

When clicked, the alignment tool on the toolbar (shown: center) is a small menu that controls alignment. (When at rest, it shows the alignment of the current selection.)

Confusions follows Blogger's use of this exact icon for two different things.

In the main toolbar, it aligns text: left, right, centered, and justified.

On the pop-up toolbar you see if you select an image, it aligns the image: left, right, center.

If you try to align an image with the text tool, nothing happens.

Text wraps around left- and right-aligned images.

PageList widget

This popular widget (aka "Pages") is one of only a few that is installed by default for new blogs.

It's powerful, but hard to configure. My step-by-step is elsewhere.

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Those are my nominees for Confusing Hall of Shame.

Did I miss anything?

Maze image: Paul Campbell/Unsplash