Maybe you didn’t upgrade one of your accounts to the “new” blogger

A disadvantage to OpenID (which concept I heartily endorse, btw) is that for many services, if you already have an ID established with that service, you CAN NOT use the same user name or e-mail address to register for the same service with OpenID (unless that’s been fixed in the last 72 hours).

Also: I don’t want to be “kestrelsaerie.vox.com” or “kestrelsaerie.wordpress.com” when I comment on Blogger: I want to be Kestrel, whose blog is at http://kestrelsaerie.us

The options when you’re creating a post are also different. The old one lets you pick text colors, sizes, and generally just about anything from buttons at the top. The new one is basically links and pictures via buttons. That’s it. And you’re writing in html code by default.

The new one isn’t total junk. They did give me a drag-and-drop, pick-your-formats-from-a-list type interface. The old one still requires you to edit the CSS.

Why would two accounts be so different? Is my old account “frozen in time” with no hope of new updates? Is it because my old one is associated with a gmail account, and my new one isn’t? Is it because one is hosted on my server, while the other is on theirs? I dunno.

I looked into WP, but got scared off when I tried to host it locally. It seemed complicated at best.

You’ve missed the point, or, at least, my point. Blogger has -taken away- the ability for someone just stopping by to drop off a comment, or someone who, for whatever reason, doesn’t WANT an OpenID. This, for me at least, has nothing to do with being able to link to my site, and everything to do with not having to jump through hoops to leave a comment. You can say “Oh it’s just a LITTLE hoop” or “If you did some research you’d see you ONLY have to do THIS…” — Doesn’t matter. Point is, I can’t just drop my nickname and a comment anymore. I either must be known as ‘anonymous,’ which you know carries no weight on the internet, or register for a service I have no desire to be a member of. And it’s now -required- to comment, unless, as I said, you want to be anonymous. THAT is the problem. You, as a blogger, have options, sure – none of which are attractive.

In short, you CAN still link to your WP or other blogs. It just takes some reading and maybe the blog author (Blogger side), enabling OpenID, which I’ll go see how to do and activate on my own blogs right away. So, it looks as if it was not THAT bad of a move, but rather people complaining without actually TRYING to understand, and all those others that (like myself), believed other complains and thought they were real…

I’m pretty sure this move from Blogger started as some way to “protect” bloggers from all those (semi-)automated spamming systems that would use that ability to link to their gold/porn/whatever selling sites even if the link they added in the comment itself was “fixed”. It’s just a case of a bad solution for a somewhat minor problem, that’s all.

Now, how many of those commenting here have taken it to Blogger support? They won’t be coming here to read the comments: if you don’t like it, make a stand and mail those devs! Personally, I don’t like WP because of that “you have to pay for more” philosophy. It doesn’t matter if it’s not much, but not even being able to edit one’s HTML template on the free service? C’mon!

So, now I’ll go see how to contact Blogger and tell them I don’t like that move. I’d advise all those around with blogger based blogs to do the same. Then we’ll see if they react or not…