Well, this is mighty embarrassing!

About my Monday's Music Moves Me post.....I had some comments. The post itself showed a 0 comment count on the main page, but there WERE several on the post's page. I logged into my Intense Debate account to reply to them, and THEY JUST DISAPPEARED!!!!! They are still in my ID overview, but I have no way to respond to any of them. I sure appreciate y'all coming by, though!

So this is the funny thing: I apparently can't reply directly from ID. Frustrating.

 I've been on the fence about ID for some time now. I originally chose it for all the login choices. You can log in with Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, WP, or link directly to your site via the name/email/site url option. I do love all those features, but I think some commenters have been led to believe they have to join Wordpress, or if they have a Wordpress or ID account, that they have to use that to comment. You DON'T. If you want to link directly to your blog from here, just be sure to sign out of ID, because using your ID or Wordpress account will link directly to your profile there. And if it forces you to use your account if you have one? Let me know, because that is something I need to know, and would never have installed something here that forces someone to sign up for a service or use any information other than what they specifically want to include. (And as for the email, if you choose to sign in with name/email/url - that's only so ID will notify you when I respond to your comment. If it's not? Again, please let me know, because that is something that I need to know, and a determining factor in whether or not I keep ID).

 Anyway...I have submitted a support ticket to ID, and am currently waiting on a reply.

 I have the most bizarre luck of anyone I know with blog stuff. Pfftttt.

 Image source: via Google image search, found at Updates From the Field
 

Why mess with a good thing?

Yes, I'm looking at YOU, Blogger! I tried the new interface. I absolutely hated it. I think I could have gotten used to the different way things were set up, but the thing that bothered me almost the most is that I couldn't just go back and forth from html to visual without messing the html up. (It is much easier for me to just type html in and I ONLY use visual to insert photos into my post in certain areaas) Another thing that bothered me almost the most is that when I tried the picture uploader with the new interface, it only posted the actual size of the picture and not the selected size, so I had to figure that out on my own and manually resize the photo myself. But I think the thing that bothers me the very most is that after all this time, Blogger has had ample opportunity develop and implement a much better commenting system, eliminating the need for a third party add-on, but has not done so.

I will be fine. I will figure out how to maneuver around the new interface eventually, and luckily, I can resize my own photos. I know free is free and I'm trying hard not to complain (I left a self-hosted wordpress site to come back to Blogger, after all!), but the changes I've seen have not been good ones. And what happens to the people who get frustrated who can't do their own html, or position or resize their own photos? Will they just be forgotten and left to go to other free blog publishers?

You'd think with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter making it MUCH easier to post and interact with others than blogging, that the blog publishers would find a way to make blogging simpler and more useful instead of making their tools more difficult to use.

Hopefully some of the issues I've mentioned will be worked out by the time the permanent interface changes go live and we're forced to use it whether we like it or not.

If you see the Comic Sans font, please reload

So I tweaked the blog just a little bit more (and have a teensy bit more to go before I'm truly done), and one of the things I did was tweak the Post Title field. Then, to my horror, I've noticed that when I first bring up my blog after a long period of not having been signed in, the post title field shows up in COMIC SANS FONT!!!

Comic Sans, according to my own Google web search, is always in the top lists of the worst fonts ever made. I personally don't hate it, but it really does only belong in comic books and graphic novels, and maybe on certain types of graphics themselves. Certainly not in the post title field of my blog! But what is weirdest about the entire thing is that I changed this in Blogger's template designer, where I certainly did not select it. I even checked the html of my design, and nowhere is Comic Sans listed as one of the possibilities for font usage. Just so you know, the Lobster font (pictured at right) or a variety of ms fonts in the event that you don't have Lobster installed on your computer, is what you should see when you read this site.

I am scratching my head (and cringing) over this one. If you see the Comic Sans font, a simple reload should get you back to good if it bothers you like it does me.

Comic Sans font graphic courtesty of a Google web search which turned up the photo, but not the source. Lobster font graphic courtesy of fontsquirrel.com

My new digs

So, a recent development on the home front prompted me to finally let my hosting go when it runs out later this year. I will probably let the domain go as well, but I'll wait and see on that one. This means that my self-hosted wordpress blog will soon be no more, so I came over here to set up a new place to call home on the web.

What do you think? I like it thus far. A lot of new and handy-dandy features have been added to Blogger's functionality since I left a few years ago. Unfortunately, a much needed comment system overhaul was not one of those changes, but the default comments are still a lot better than what they were.

I opted to go with Disqus for comments, since I already had a Disqus account and thought they would provide everything I needed. However, they apparently changed their templates to no longer include a url field for someone leaving a comment, and most people do not want to have to register for a service just to leave a comment that will link them to their website for a return visit.

I finally looked into Intense Debate more closely, and I think it's going to work for me over here. I love that registration isn't necessary to leave a url with comment, that there are several different commenting options, including social networking sites. And I love, love, love that you can add plugins to it! In fact, I added one of my favorite WP plugins, CommentLuv, to it. Now, that plugin did make the comment form a bit wonky, and I don't really like that there is nothing I can do about it at the moment because I can not see the code to try to reconfigure it. But still, it's not too confusing.

Other than that, just about the only thing I *don't* like about it is that the name field limits you to 20 characters. But then again, I guess I have to remember that not everyone has a name as long as some of mine have been! And I look forward to customizing it a bit more.

I obviously have more settling in to do, and some kinks to work out. But I'm liking the design, and I'm going to post over here regularly from here on out. I'll still be at my .net for a while yet, and I may eventually try to retro-post some of my favorite entries from that blog over here before it disappears for good.

And for today, and today ONLY!!! (unless I need to again on another day), I am turning back the hands of time so that I can have this entry posted yesterday like I had intended before I ran out of steam, and also get the first in my "31 Days till Halloween" countdown series posted.