Complaints About New Blogger, with bonus cat photos

Swistle touched briefly in her post today on the new Blogger interface (the behind-the-scenes part of the blog), specifically about how much she hates it, "even after giving myself time to get used to the change since I always initially resist change". That made me laugh first because I'm exactly that way myself, and second because I have been keeping a list of all the things I hate about the new Blogger interface, so I wouldn't forget any when it came time to post complainingly about it. So I think now is the time! If you don't care, just nod and go to the end for the cat picture (and a little news).

In no particular order:

• The Preview feature shows the post filling the whole screen (no sidebar), and without the title. Or in other words, not at all like it will look when published. Helpful. The composition pane actually looks more like the final product than Preview does.
• There is often an extra space at the beginning of paragraphs. This is one of the Twelve Approved Ways to Drive Your Proofreader Insane.
• If you add in a bunch of pictures and then dare to move any around, it completely messes up the spacing between them, leading to vast spaces that you can't see or delete in the composition pane.
• Speaking of photos, mine often will appear in the pop-up upload window the right way up, but appear in the post sideways. I have to go back, re-load the picture, tell it to turn clockwise, tell it to turn counterclockwise, then insert. This may be something funky from Picasa, or something between Picasa and Blogger, but it's all Google, it should work together, just fix it!
• When I upload a bunch of photos, it assumes I want to insert them all at once, and I have to de-select all the ones I'm not ready for.
• Then, when I go back to insert the others, the photos are often not visible on the pop-up. They're there, they can be selected and added, I just can't see them, so I can't see which ones are which. Very helpful.
• And even when you've added the photos to the post, they stay in the pop-up window. In case you want to put them in a second time, I guess, like I do that a lot. Maybe I should start?
• The calendar is Monday-through-Sunday. I believe I am not the only person who mentally defaults to a Sunday-to-Saturday view. That's the way we do things in my country, and seeing it another way messes with my mind something awful. (The Boston Ballet's website does the same thing. Perhaps it's supposed to be cool and European? It isn't, though, it's just annoying. For that matter, the BB's website is so incredibly unfriendly that every year I call to get Nutcracker tickets instead. And you know I will always do things online instead of calling if at all possible. [This week I had to file my Unemployment by calling, since the website was having technical difficulties, and it was just so much more annoying.] But trying to get seats in a specific spot in the theater is, I have found, not possible online. Whereas the phone people are wonderful and friendly and helpful and everything phone people should be and almost never are. To sum up this incredibly long digression on the Boston Ballet: the website is an uncategorical FAIL, but the phone center people are all WIN.)(Whew.)
• This one is a tiny change but continues to stymie me: In the toolbar at the top of the composition pane, the button to add a link used to be a couple of little chain links, like this: . It's for links, it's a chain, get it? Well, in the new interface, they replaced it with the word Link, there in the middle of all the symbols, and my eye keeps skipping over it. It's been a month or more since they forced the new interface on us, but I still keep looking for the chain. I link a lot, and it's pretty annoying.
• When I'm looking at the posts that exist for this blog, if I switch it to only show posts that have been published (as opposed to drafts), I can't search. I have to be on All Posts to search. (I initially thought you couldn't search posts at all, which I do a lot, and I was pissed! But it turns out you can ... just not everywhere, which is weird.)
• Finally, I was typing away one day when Google logged me out, mid-sentence. WTF? I had to reenter my password, and it lost the last bit I'd written. It hasn't happened again, but once was enough to make the list.

There! I feel better. Feel free to unload your own rants in the comments if you like, on whatever subject is irking you.

I promised cats, so here we are:

She is hoping that the magical fluff powers of her tail will protect her from me and my evil intentions.
He is asleep.

Oh, and the news? The company where I had the two phone interviews and the editing test has called me in for an interview. You know, the traditional face-to-face kind. Wooo! Wednesday afternoon. Which means I will be taking a sleeping pill tonight and tomorrow night.