Hairball

BlogSpot, my Internet blog-service, what you’re looking at, in its infinite wisdom, changed its user-interface to what’s pictured above.
Totally unannounced of course. No warning whatsoever.
I fired it up the other night (probably Monday, September 17, 2012), and there it was.
Changes like this I dreaded.
What usually happened when my wife was alive was she’d waddle in, express concern, and then I just figured it out myself.
I no longer have a wife to express concern. She died slightly over a month ago.
So, time to engage guile and cunning, and figure out the damn thing myself.
I studied the interface a few seconds, and then engaged my storied method of figuring out computer applications: try this and see what happens.
I clicked various software radio-buttons. I copy/pasted a blog I had written.
It was very messy at first, but the blog was messy. It wasn’t their interface, it was my HTML. Tags were goofed up.
If I don’t use caret-equivalents in an HTML example, BlogSpot invisiblizes the example.
It cranked.
I did a bold-tag example in my blog, and it cranked everything in my blog from then on.
My bold-tag still had active carets (real carets), and there was no closing tag (</span>). —It was supposed to be just an example.
I dickered some, and fixed a few things.
It looked better.
What I say is BlogSpot “Facebooked” their user-interface.
They made it so you could compose right in their window, post useless drivel like what Facebook is often used for.
Wake up and immediately fire up your ‘pyooter, crank into Facebook your condition, e.g. the condition of your belly-button. Stuff no one cares about except you the writer.
I suppose you could compose right into the old BlogSpot interface before, but that’s not what I did.
I crank my blogs into a word-processor, and then copy/paste into BlogSpot.
And my blogs ain’t the self-absorbed maunderings of a person lacking a life.
I’m writing stuff much like what I wrote for a column I had in the Daily-Messenger newspaper in Canandaigua.
I do it in a word-processor because that automatically spellchecks.
My HTML-tags are in a file I copy/paste.
BlogSpot has radio-buttons for bolding text, etc, but I looked at their completed file as plain text, and they were doing the same HTML I do myself.
So I do it myself.
That Messenger column lasted about eight months, and then was ended after I got the flag-police inflamed.
One day my flag-mount pulled out in the wind, and Old Glory ended up on the ground. The same day, my Houdini-dog escaped my kennel, but got hung up on the chain-link fence.
So which came first, my dog or Old Glory?
I had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to think my dog was more alive than Old Glory, which offended the flag-police.
So ended my Messenger column. The powers-that-be at the Mighty Mezz dared not offend the flag-police.
But I figured out BlogSpot’s new interface myself, as you can see.

• My beloved wife of over 44 years died of cancer April 17, 2012. Like me she was 68. I miss her dearly.
• “HTML” is Hyper-Text Markup language, a background instruction system made invisible in text by surrounding carets (“<” and “>”). I use it only to embolden, underline and italicize text, although it can do other things. My picture-inserts and links are also via HTML-tag.
• “‘Pyooter” is computer.
• The “Mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired almost seven years ago. Best job I ever had — I worked there almost 10 years (over 11 if you count my time as an post-stroke unpaid intern [I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I recovered fairly well]). (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where I live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 14 miles away.)