Well, they finally did it to me. After nine months of getting away with still using the old interface even though they kept saying that it would be upgraded, Blogger updated the Dashboard against my will. I'm not happy.
I like to compose my posts with the HTML editor, and now it doesn't insert the line breaks automatically. Unless I want everything to come out as one huge paragraph, I have to use the "Compose" feature which I hate. As for the rest of it, I suppose it loads faster, but I can't find anything now. As much as I may want to, I'm not going to jump ship to Wordpress because I can't understand a damned thing on that site anyway.
Just to add insult to injury, Photobucket also joined in this madness by updating their site design (which is also still optional for a while) with a dumbed down but, paradoxically, less easy to navigate mess. Now my images all upload with an underscore and a load of random numbers and letters after them such as "underworld_zps2b76599e.jpg". That really annoys me! I tried to change the filenames, but then the images disappeared from my blog posts. Maybe it's time to look for a new image host or just not use any more pictures.
Finally, Twitter has a new official widget which is now the only one available on its site, but it doesn't work yet! I deleted the old version to put this cool-looking but useless thing in the sidebar, and was stupid enough to not keep a backup of the code. Thus, I've been forced to put the amateur-looking but still functional one from the gadgets directory at the bottom of my sidebar instead.
Why can't the developers ever leave good enough alone? This reminds me of how I used to love MySpace until they ruined it with all the streams and a load of widgets which slowed it down to a crawl. YouTube has also become even more irritating to find anything on since that all changed and they removed the labels feature. As for Facebook, why did anyone think that the timeline would be a good idea? It's made me not want to use Facebook at all anymore. What's next?
Even my current operating system, Ubuntu 12.04, is only still acceptable by using the Gnome "fallback" mode. I can't get on with Unity, Gnome 3 or KDE, and I certainly don't want any of those rough-looking lighter desktops. With a new Ubuntu only a month away, I might have to go back to using Windows. Well, unless that means Windows 8. If I have to use that crap, I might as well give up completely.
Are all these changes just to give people something to do or to satisfy the latest smartphone users? It doesn't do me any good. I loathe smartphones and only have an old Tracfone. I don't even use it all that often to make any calls and haven't got any credit on it at the moment. I couldn't imagine typing in my blog posts by pressing the same keys a hundred times over with my thumbs. Christ! What a world we live in.
For years everybody was quite happy with Firefox and all its plug-ins but, noooo, now all the kewl kids have to use Chrome (which you can't add anything to) because it's easier and they either can't think or don't have to think about it. Look at the Google search engine and how it wants to fill in everything for you (unless, like me, you've turned that infuriating "instant" nonsense off and removed the "safe" filtering). No wonder nobody ever leaves the social networking sites to look at anything else. It's like being trapped by AOL's custom interface all over again. How is any of this supposed to make using the internet more enjoyable?
Technology is conspiring against us. I never thought I'd see the day when all the changes right across the board would actually make things less usable than before, but it's happening.
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