It seems that Mac users are being treated as second-class citizens by Blogger.
I've found that when I go to compose posts, there's a whole whack of formatting options which I can view and use from my PC at work, but which are not available on my Mac at home. There, the only buttons available at the top of the post composition window are the spell checker, and Add Image. That's right - no bold, no italics, no font size, type, colour or alignment selection, no links, block quotes, bullets/numbering, etc. etc. etc. And God knows, I need EMPHASIS in my writing! ;-)
Which is not to say that these things can't be done from a Mac. It's just that I have to go in and manually insert the requisite HTML code, for each bit of formatting I want. While this may serve as a useful reminder of the HTML I learned years ago, it's quite tiresome to have to haul out hubby's Big Black Book of code every time I want to post at home. Otherwise, I just end up writing posts, saving them as drafts, then formatting and publishing them the next day from my PC at work.
I've looked at Blogger's help pages, which seem to suggest I may have more luck if I switch to Mozilla Firefox as my browser (I use Safari at present, and occasionally Internet Explorer - both of which have this problem). But it really is annoying that this is even an issue. I hate the way that so many Web-based applications (Yahoo Messenger being another) treat Mac users as an afterthought, if at all.
Man. I think I'm beginning to morph into a blog geek. My friend (and blogger extraordinaire) Jonathan often blogs about these sorts of technical issues himself, including all the problems that result when you view the formatting of your blog from different browsers. I used to put it down to his general curmudgeonliness, but now I think I'm beginning to understand. Mea culpa, McWetboy.
*UPDATE 29 JULY* Have now installed Firefox at home...formatting tools have indeed appeared! Wheeee!
1 comment:
If you were a real blog geek, you wouldn't worry about -- nay, you would not deign to use -- formatting tools. Ahem.
It's a Javascript function that isn't supported in Safari; it's not that Blogger is anti-Mac, it's a technical barrier. I'm not sure whose fault it is: Blogger for using technology unsupported by the #3 browser engine (by total market share), or Apple for not supporting the technology in said browser.
(I run into similar problems when I want to use way-cool CSS styling that only works on Firefox and Safari, but not IE. Do I leave it in so that people with proper browsers can appreciate it, or do I leave it out for consistency's sake?)
You are, of course, already aware of your options: learn a smattering of HTML (not hard) or switch to Firefox (also not hard). Naturally, I've done the former; I just like Safari too much.
Now let me tell you of the dark days long ago when you couldn't use Safari at all with Blogger.
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