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Blogger images: problems mount

A cracked pane of glass
Jef Poskanzer, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A recent back-end change for hosting Blogger images was supposed to be nearly invisible to us bloggers, and not any sort of big deal.

Instead, six months into the transition, there are clear issues that Google has not addressed.

Some may never be fixed.

Photos in Blogger changing under the hood

Hands soldering on a circuit board
Photo: Justinite

Place an image in Blogger and, lately, it is not always clear what will happen.

There have been a lot of issues recently in the help community about images. That's often a sign that the Blogger developers are tinkering.

This week we are seeing evidence of a change in the wiring.

Grownups only

Hello, young bloggers, go back up your blogs.

Like smoking, drinking, and electing leaders who are warming the planet to the boiling point, blogging is about to become an adults-only activity.

Three young people in red polo shirts at a table with microphones

That is to say,

After September 1, students designated as under 18 in K-12 Edu domains will lose access to the Blogger service.

Plug the holes in Blogger's widgets

USE THE POST EDITOR FOR FORMATTING

A formatting toobar with controls such as bold and insert hyperlink
Former formatting tools

Inexplicably, Google has rolled out new widget dialogs lacking basic functionality.

These dialogs appear when you create or edit a widget from the Layout page of the Blogger dashboard.

Another shoe drops, crippling widgets and disrupting flow

Shoes falling through the air

This week Google is removing the quick-edit tools from sidebar widgets in a way that cannot be reversed.

The removal is rolling out as I publish this report.

The only remaining option to edit these widgets uses the dumbed-down versions that are available from the Layout page of the Blogger dashboard.

The move suggests that the days of some other Blogger features that remain may be numbered.

Tame Your Snippet

A cat. poking its head through a big hole in a slice of bread.

Some bloggers (and I am one of them) are not too happy with the snippitization of their posts by the most recent crop of themes from Blogger.

Older themes (like this one) render the entire post on the home page or end at your jump break.

But the new responsive themes suck up the first few sentences, strip them of all formatting, hyperlinks, and paragraph breaks, and add a "read more" link that goes to the post's post page, automatically.

Neverending Blogger.com changes

Those busy beavers at Blogger never rest! And, one is tempted to add, unfortunately.

Icons for batch operations in Blogger

This week's change involves the batch controls, with special implications for managing labels.