Blogger Beta Reloaded - Have you upgraded? Don't bother

A simple little ^%$# stack overflow error I found on my blog when it's viewed in IE lead to me migrating my blog to Blogger Beta, a new template, a headache, 3 cups of coffee, 4 hours of sleep, and a pissed off wife. Holy crap what a waste of time! I want to get off this crappy platform already!

Here are some of my comments off the top as to why I hate Blogger Beta:

• Bugs, bugs, bugs and more bugs. I could hardly do anything without hitting a roadblock as an error popped up on my screen. For example, you can't upload images yet. The system hangs. What the hell is this? Microsoft Windows? I was half expecting to see a blue screen of death or one that has the Google colours. This was nuts! This is not an open source product - it's Google!
  
• Same crappy templates. I thought - hey, maybe I'll change up my template as they must have new ones - right? Wrong! Although they have some new drag and drop web 2.0 whiz-bang technology it's the same old crappy templates minus all of the adjustments that I had made which took hours and hours. This may end my blogging career.
• NO TEMPLATE EDITING. Is this grade 2 and are you protecting me from the bad wolf? Why can't I edit the template??? I could not add in some of my custom code that I had and was forced to make crappy work-arounds. This is ridiculous. I don't care of this will be released soon. Don't offer the upgrade unless you have all the goods. I didn't see anywhere that this wouldn't be offered right away.
  
• Adsense is no more. They removed their easy AdSense placement. While I never really took advantage of this, I tried to place the Adsense code myself on the sidebar but the special HTML/JavaScript sidebar feature had a bug in it. This made the least sense as it's in Google interest to make using AdSense easy. Hey I made $0.31 so far (that's American money by the way) and I want this thing to work.
• Blog Title does not go to the home page. How can visitors get to my home page? I tried a few things with the title but nothing has worked. This really is a pain in the ass.
• Categories. t's great that Blogger finally added categories and you can see I put them to good use below. However, the feature that is supposed to add them to the side of the page doesn't seem to be working. Surprise, surprise.
  

This was just a small bit of the problems I faced. I still don't have the ability to pre-publish my posts. Bottom line - Wordpress, here I come. I I refuse to be treated like a dumb user.

Was anyone else as warped as I was to try this out?

Chad

PS - Any feedback on the new template?
PPS - Yes, I know it's free by Google has a gazillion dollars and can do better.
PPPS - I did like the new spellcheck I must admit.

Tags: wordpress blogger beta