I think the folks at Google are trying to put us out of business.

Posted by David Mastio on 12 February 02007 @ 8pm

One thing I’ve been meaning to contact you about–and this seems as good a time to do so as any–is that by default, Blogger’s WYSIWYG post editor uses inline styles to set bold and italics. You seem to have cvilleblogs.com stripping out inline styles, so I was going to suggest opening a hole for just those two, since all of the Blogger-hosted blogs are losing much of their formatting.

When I think of it, I’m just nesting [em] and [strong] inside the inline styles, but most people don’t have the knowledge/inclination to do so.

I don’t know how you have it set up, and I can think of a few ways where this would be more trouble than it’s worth to change on your end, so I’m not expecting any kind of fix, but I thought I’d at least bring it to your attention.

Posted by Fletcher Reede on 12 February 02007 @ 10pm

You seem to have cvilleblogs.com stripping out inline styles

I see plenty of bold and italic words on the site right now, so I’m not sure what you mean.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 12 February 02007 @ 10pm

God I hated blogger! I had my blog on there for three months, the first of which, my feed didn’t work, and then it randomly turned off occasionally after it finally did start to work..sometimes for as long as a full day.

The thing that aggravated me the most though was the fact that they provide you absolutely NO way to contact them.

Posted by Terry Carter on 12 February 02007 @ 11pm

so I’m not sure what you mean.

I can’t find an example right now that uses bold or italics, but I found one that demonstrates the stripped styles. If you check out the source to this post, the words “Memo to a Brief” are written as [u][span style="font-size: 130%;"]Memo to a Brief[/span][br][/u].

On Cvilleblogs.com, the same block of text appears as [u][span]Memo to a Brief[/span][br][/u].

The inline style (font-size in the case, but it’s how Blogger does bold and italics now) gets stripped out of the [span] tag.

Posted by Fletcher Reede on 13 February 02007 @ 12am

I’m being censored…

Posted by Jason on 13 February 02007 @ 4pm

Actually, been meaning to ask, does the new interface for VPB allow you to remove individual posts or are you still stuck with all or nothing on the feeds? Or is it just a visual change and the interface is pretty much the same? Just curious…

Posted by Jason on 13 February 02007 @ 4pm

Blogger has always sucked.

Posted by finnegan on 13 February 02007 @ 4pm

The inline style (font-size in the case, but it’s how Blogger does bold and italics now) gets stripped out of the [span] tag.

I understand now. Yes, that’s done in order to prevent one wonky style tag from destroying the display of every subsequent blog entry. Accepting any elements to a span tag is just bad security. That’s totally ridiculous that Blogger handles bold and italics with span tags. We have strong and em tags for that.

Actually, been meaning to ask, does the new interface for VPB allow you to remove individual posts or are you still stuck with all or nothing on the feeds? Or is it just a visual change and the interface is pretty much the same?

It’s an entirely new system. FeedWordPress, which drives it, imports the blog entries directly into WordPress, using the author and timestamp that’s used in the RSS feed of the original blog entry. So if one blog entry has some screwy HTML, for instance, then I can open it up and fix that HTML, as I would with a blog entry on my own site. It’s a great improvement.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 13 February 02007 @ 5pm

Yeah, I didn’t really expect you to do anything about it, and assumed you were stripping out the styles for just that reason. Just thought I’d pass it on, so you’d know what was going on if someone emails you someday wanting to know what happened to their formatting.

Posted by Fletcher Reede on 13 February 02007 @ 10pm

I just got around to looking for the bug in Blogger and their help forum is full of people convinced their feeds aren’t working. It seems as though feeds have to be updated to the following formulas:

http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full
or
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Any chance you’d want to test it with one of us dinosaurs on Blogger to see if editing the feed address will help?

Not that I think anyone’s dying to read my blog entries. :)

Posted by Jeannine on 26 February 02007 @ 8pm

I’ve been updating oodles of blogs to that new format — it’s that very feed address that’s creating the problem. The old style feed URLs are breaking left and right and, every time that happens, I update it to reflect the new feed URL structures. It’s those feeds that are problematic — the Atom feeds (the former one of the two that you list) are semi-valid, and the RSS feeds are totally invalid.

The good news is that your feed is working just fine, and has been all along.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 26 February 02007 @ 8pm