The Moral Liberal

By T. F. Stern,

Before I get started let me make it clear that I’m grateful beyond being able to express my gratitude to the folks at Blogger for providing a medium which permits just about anyone with internet connections the ability to rant on and on about anything they so desire at no expense. I’m sure they make money from their services; just not directly from me. Thank you; it would be a sin and a shame for me not to acknowledge such a neat service.

Okay, why am I frustrated with Blogger? It has to do with Blogger having a will of its own, so to speak, when uploading articles for publication. Maybe it’s just the dummy on the keyboard, maybe not; but I’ve been having the devil of a time of late.

Yesterday when attempting to post Bing This I ran across some significant challenges. Granted, there were some built in facets which required planning and execution; tabbed quotations and colored background on certain paragraphs led the way. What turned out to be the straw, the straw that broke this camel’s back, was watching Blogger reorganize the article, placing entire paragraphs helter-skelter each time I went in to edit. Any seemingly insignificant alteration moved paragraphs from the middle of the article all the way to the bottom.

I almost gave up on that particular post; but remembered a trick from long ago. I grabbed the entire article and dropped it into a temporary Notebook “txt” file. At that point it washed away any hidden commands and let me post back to Blogger. That worked fine until I attempted to tab over the quotations; you’d have thought I shot my computer in the gut the way it treated my article. I decided to settle for less than planned for; but close enough for “government work”.

Today was a re-run of the same issues while posting, Houston’s Metro a Microcosm of Washington , and without the back colored lines for effect. The tabbed quotations worked just fine; that is until chaos broke out each time I tried to edit the post, the post which showed up beautifully once, now started moving paragraphs all over the article. Why is that, Blogger fans?

I did away with tabbed quotations and made sure not to do any editing, none. That worked and I guess I’ll have to live with these new limitations; no editing, zip, nada and zilch!

I did have to go back over to my Facebook account, delete the reference link I’d established after having seen what I thought was the finished product, re-enter the link with the newly assigned URL and call it a morning. Gosh and oh by golly that was fun, now where’s that bear with the tooth ache?

I think from now on I’ll simply leave a comment after the article has been published instead of taking the chance Frankenstein’s Monster will show up if I attempt to edit, even making a spelling correction. Now I can let out a sigh, breathe in, breathe out and get on with my day.

The Moral Lib­eral asso­ciate edi­tor, T.F. Stern, is a retired City of Hous­ton police offi­cer, self-employed lock­smith, and gifted polit­i­cal and social com­men­ta­tor. His pop­u­lar and insight­ful blog, T.F. Sterns Rant­i­ngs, has been up and at it since Jan­u­ary of 2005.