Such are the burrs under our saddle

Time now for some pet peeves. Nothing earthshaking, just seemingly mindless stuff that aggravates, annoys and mystifies.

   Blogger.com needs a few good clues: Much good can be said about Blogger, beginning with the fact that for a freebie, it offers a terrific service. A bazillion blogging wannabes have flocked to it as a user-friendly, no-cost way to give this medium a try. However, there are problems.
   Blogger.com problem No. 1 is that since it’s free and demand for it appears infinite, chronic, recurring system overload is assured. Come one, come all — and wait . . . and wait . . . and wait . . . and oh the hell with it.
   Here’s part of a Blogger.com notice posted at the beginning of the week, after weeks of transient slowdowns and freeze-outs, where users couldn’t get to their writing/publishing pages:

   This brings up Blogger problem No. 2. To get to the Blogger status page, you login at the login page, which takes you to your dashboard page. The Blogger Help link is well down the page. Click it and you go to the help page, where, well down the page, there’s a link for the status page. Click it and you finally reach the status page. This is what we call an unnecessary rigmarole.
   Why in blue blazes don’t the good folks at Blogger put status messages right on the dashboard page instead of those inane “news” items that grow stale long before another is posted? Speaking of growing stale, Blogger is all about communicating, so we’d expect the people behind it to be decent communicators. This evening of Dec. 2, the status page’s newest entry is:

   What about the “additional information our progress toward these goals”? Who knows? Using past performance as a guide, the next status message will appear a few hours to several days past the time when X-number of Blogger.com users have jumped out of upper-story windows due to sheer frustration because they can’t get their latest bolt of brilliance posted and published.

   Enough Dreamweaver books already: Go to Barnes & Noble or Borders and check out the shelves of books devoted to building Web pages. You’ll quickly discover that a good two-thirds, maybe more, of all the titles are devoted to Dreamweaver. It’s beginning to look as though anyone who actually learns how to use Dreamweaver writes a book about the experience.
   There are so many of these Dreamweaver tomes that they’re getting into esoteric areas. Such as “Dreamweaver the Feng Shui Way,” “The Maxillo-facial Reconstructive Surgeon’s Dreamweaver Guide,” “Dreamweaver Made Easy for Senior Citizens” and “Our Dreamweaver, Ourselves.”
   If you happen to prefer Microsoft FrontPage, you might find a book or two to help you get the most out of it. You say you prefer Webfusion? Good luck! If, like us, you opted for the powerful, broadly featured and much-less-expensive Namo Web Editor, you’re S-O-L.
   We attribute this to a herd mentality coupled with the desire for a sure thing at the publishing houses. Dreamweaver evidently outsells all other serious Web page-building software, so publishing decision makers tell writers they only want to see manuscripts about Dreamweaver. The problem, of course, is that if they all do this — and they all do — a glut is assured. Inevitably, a whole lot of Dreamweaver books end up on the $2.99 closeout table or get sent to the paper recycler.
   One final observation. If I were of a mind to spend several hundred dollars on page-building software, the very fact that so many books are devoted to showing people how to use Dreamweaver would lead me to certain off-putting conclusions about the program — hard to get started with, overly complex, poor documentation, hidden “features,” numerous gotchas, bugs, etc.
   So, if anyone comes across a decent book featuring Namo, please let us know. For now, we’re working with Namo’s own decent manual and the learning technique known as trial and error.