Blogger's new WYSIWYG Feature

Blogger has launched a new WYSIWYG feature that allows people to "compose" blog posts with HTML formatting built-in (ala Gmail). Unfortunately, there seems to be a few bugs in the new feature.

I'm glad I was reading other people's blog posts prior to updating my own blogs today; at least I had an idea of what was in store for me, since I use Firefox as my default browser.

Just to be on the safe side, I first updated one of my blogs using Internet Explorer. There were a few stray div tags around my blockquote entry, which strangely enough, only screwed up my previous posts, not my new post. The old posts ended up being flushed completely to the left of the margin, and my sidebar disappeared to the bottom of the page.

To work-around the problem, I simply switched to "Edit HTML" mode, edited the post directly in HTML by removing the misbehaving div tags, and voila! When I republished the post, it was working just fine. :)

So here I am attempting to update another blog, this time using Firefox. When I first entered the Create Post page, I found an incomplete page -- no little tabs on the upper right corner, no ability to preview, and no buttons along the upper left of the edit area. Thank goodness for this post in Massless.org, which gave me the tip to just refresh Firefox on the Create Post page. So far, it appears to be working fine. The true test, of course, will be the blog post. If you're reading this, then I guess it worked.

A last thought -- I really admire the folks at Blogger who are gamely taking the punches from folks who are peeved by the bugs in the WYSIWYG feature. To have worked hard on this capability and to have this type of negative fallout -- well, lesser mortals would have been crushed and become dysfunctional. You've got to admire their attitude and dedication to this service.

Update: Just found the Blogger Help page that describes the WYSIWYG feature.