Blogger, Beware: You Get What You Pay For

I’ve been ant-crawling through the blog’s html code for the past two hours. I finally figured out why some key words (usually place names) get chopped out of the blog feed in Bloglnes. For example, if you read Hail to the Bully in Chief in Bloglines, you wouldn’t know where the cruise missiles might have been headed. I won’t give you the answer here because it would just get hacked again in the feed. When I looked at the code surrounding the word, I found that Google/Blogger inserted something like this:

st1:place st="on" Tehran

Ihad to modify the syntax so the code would appear here and not be swallowed up as another tag. This is too 2Deepgeek! Bloglines choked on it. So did I. My guess is this is some kind of tag for Google advertising. And also some kind of geo tag. Maybe if I activated AdSense you’d see an advert for the Tehran Hilton.

I read blogs in Bloglines, not on the blog page itself. When I read pages with conventional blog architecture, pages with text tumbling down one fat and one or two skinny columns, my screen-reader (ZoomText 8.1) reads across the columns. The content gets garbled. It sounds like Finnegans Wake or a teenager’s continuous partial attention. Reading blogs in a feed aggregator like Bloglines allows me to separate signal from noise because feeds usually deliver only the fat column’s content. that’s how RSS revolutionized my ability to read on the Internet.

So when I launched this blog, the first thing I did was subscribe to the feed. I’ve been very disappointed with the result. I thought I was doing something wrong. It’s the kind of problem that gives editors ulcers.

There’s a reason why this blog is designated version 1.0. Version 2.0 will be powered by a different blog platform that allows me, not Google, to control these shenanigans.