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5 Things To Dislike About Free Google Blogger Blog

by CeresSchwarz

The free Google Blogger blog is a great blogging platform but it's not without its imperfections and flaws. What are some of the things that one might dislike about said platform?

There should be no doubt, especially to those that are familiar with it, that the free Google Blogger blog is a great and impressive blogging platform. It's not just the fact that it's free and that pretty much anyone can make use of it. It's also how it has a lot of pretty cool and amazing features and how it's not that hard to use.

But this isn't about how awesome this blogging platform is so let's not focus on all those noteworthy features. While it's true that Blogger is wonderful, it's also true that it isn't perfect. It has its flaws and imperfections and it could definitely use some improvements.

But then again, humans themselves are also flawed and imperfect so is it a wonder if there are sites that are the same? Is there even a perfect website? That's not really the point though, is it?

The point is that there are a number of things in Blogger that can incite feelings of annoyance and dislike amongst its users. Some of these things might even make one shed tears of frustration and hopelessness. What are some of these things and are there any possible solutions or a possible work-around for some of these problems?

5 Things To Dislike About Free Google Blogger Blog
5 Things To Dislike About Free Google Blogger Blog

1. Autosave

A double-edged sword

"Hey," you say, "I thought this was supposed to be things to dislike about Google Blogger. Why is its autosave feature part of this list then? Shouldn't this be considered a good thing? What's so bad about this?"

Good questions. Actually, the autosave feature is both a good and a bad thing. What does that mean? Thanks to the autosave feature, your blog constantly saves whatever you write or put on your post even if you don't make use of the save button.

A double-edged sword

That's what Google Blogger blog's autosave feature is like
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This is especially great if you're not one to click the save button often or if you forget to click the save button so you don't have to worry about losing whatever you just wrote and then have to go through the trouble of writing it all over again.

However, this can also be a bad thing precisely because the autosave happens constantly and in a very fast manner.

Let's take a look at some possible scenarios of when this can be a bad thing:

If you delete portions of a post you're writing but soon change your mind and decide that you want it back, what would you do?

You would click on the undo button but what happens when autosave has already kicked in (trust me, it will kick in; it's really fast) and you find that you can no longer undo the changes that you made?

Sometimes, the undo button might bring back a few things, if you're lucky, but it won't bring back everything thanks to how fast autosave is. What if you paste some text or images and the like on your post but you decide that you don't want it there? Trying to use the undo button will not work if you don't do it before autosave kicks in.

So you'll have to go through the trouble of having to delete the unwanted parts of your post manually. At least you can console yourself with the fact that you didn't lose anything. But what if you're trying to fix the formatting of your post and you somehow end up turning a lot of the text into links (no, I have no idea how that can even happen but it's happened to me)?

Of course, you'd want to undo it. I try to use the undo button and even the backspace but, somehow, you can end up deleting chunks of text thanks to the autosave feature kicking in. And the annoying and frustrating thing about this is when you find out that you can't bring back the text that you just lost thanks to being unable to undo this.

In short, the autosave feature of the Google Blogger blog is really like a double-edged sword. It can be a very good, useful and helpful feature but, on the other hand, it can be your worst nightmare if you're not careful enough. You'll have to learn to use this feature to your advantage so you won't end up losing chunks of your text or worse, your entire post.

2. Polls

Cannot add a poll inside a blog post

There are many uses for polls and there are many instances why it would be a good idea to have a poll or 2 in an article.

For example, if you're writing about products that you're comparing with each other, you can have a poll asking readers which product they prefer.

Or if you're writing about a list of items such as 10 gift ideas for Saint Patrick's Day, you can have a poll asking readers which of these presents they would like to acquire or what their favorite is.

Polls are a great way to get visitors to interact with your article while also allowing them to share their opinions and to let their voice be heard by giving them the chance to vote.

Google Blogger Blog

You can add a poll gadget to your blog but you can only place this on your sidebar or footer
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As such, it's no wonder that sites like Wizzley and HubPages give its authors an easy way to be able to add polls inside their articles. This is as simple and easy as clicking on a button and having the poll show up, ready to be filled with the question and the choices.

In the same way, Google Blogger also allows you to have a poll on your blog. There is a poll gadget, which you can add to your sidebars or footers. However, that poll cannot be added inside or within your post, which can be quite a problem if that's what you want to do. If you add a poll outside of your blog post, it wouldn't be right to ask questions that only pertain to a single article because the poll itself can be found on all the pages of your blog.

I usually use polls on my HubPages and Wizzley articles but, much as I would love to do the same for my blog posts, I am unable to do so since there is no poll capsule or module on Google Blogger. I searched around for a bit and found that it is possible to add a poll inside your Blogger post, however, this will take some time since you're going to have to figure out exactly how.

Configure Your Poll

It's easy to put a poll on your Google Blogger blog as it's simply a matter of filling out the details and then clicking the save button. In fact, it might be harder to choose an answer to the poll question such as trying to decide what is the best scarf

In short, it's not readily available in a convenient way so it can be quite a hassle especially for those who may not have much time to read up on how to do this.

3. Reviews / Ratings

Cannot add a review or rating inside a blog post

If you're writing a review (for example of a book or product or recipe), then it's only natural that you'd want to be able to add a rating to whatever it is you're reviewing. 

For example, if you think that whatever you're reviewing should be rated 3 out of 5 stars, then wouldn't you want said rating to be easily visible in your article?

Wouldn't it also be great if the visitors to your article also had the ability to be able to give their own rating for whatever you just rated?

In cases like this, a review rating capsule, like the one that HubPages has, would definitely be useful. 

I make use of said capsules on hubs that require the use of it.

Stars

Unfortunately, you can't add a review gadget to your Google Blogger blog article. But HubPages easily lets you do this via the Ratings Capsule wherein you have 3 possible choices for rating something - Your Rating, Audience Rating & Audience Recipe Rating
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It gives me the chance to show, visually, the rating of a product or item while also allowing readers to be able to give their own ratings.

Unfortunately, this is not possible with Google Blogger. You can still write reviews for your blog posts but if you want to add a rating for those reviews, you'll just have to state what this rating is. You can put it in a large font so it's easily visible or you can add an image of stars to indicate your rating.

However, you won't be able to give your visitors the chance to rate the item or product in question unless they give their rating in a comment. It's really too bad that Blogger doesn't give you this option. If you search around, you can find that there are actually ways to work around this problem and let you add a review rating capsule to your blog post.

However, this would take time and effort as opposed to just clicking on an already available button and having the review rating capsule ready to be used, just like how it is on HubPages.

4. Drafts

Inability to recover lost draft

This is actually the inspiration for this article.

Sad enough to cry?

Who wouldn't be sad upon finding out that they lost an entire article that they worked so hard to finish?

Needless to say, this happened to me and it was beyond horrifying not to mention extremely frustrating and annoying. I lost not just one draft but two. What made things worse (could things actually get worse than that?) was the fact that these weren't just mere drafts.

They weren't articles that I've started to work on but have yet to finish. Rather, they were actually completed and finished articles that were ready to be published. The only reason I hadn't published them yet was the fact that I follow a schedule when it comes to publishing posts.

This means that I have a lot of what I like to call finished drafts which are articles that I'm ready to publish but which are still categorized as drafts by Blogger. Whenever I finish an article, I just leave it as a draft and move on to work on my next article. I never thought that I'd actually end up losing a draft, much less two. I didn't think it was possible to lose a draft but, unfortunately, it is.

Losing a draft is like the End of the World?

Okay, that might be a bit too much of an exaggeration. But, really, who wants to lose a draft especially if it's an article that you're ready to publish?
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However, I'm not exactly sure what happened that led to my losing those 2 drafts.

I didn't even realize the exact moment that I'd lost those drafts.

I only noticed the missing drafts when I was checking my other articles.

By then it was too late since I had absolutely no idea how to bring back those drafts.

Of course that quickly led to a search for ways to recover lost Google Blogger post drafts.

I saw that many had also experienced losing their drafts.

But the sad thing was how everything I found about the topic said that there was no way to recover a lost draft.

If it was gone, then it was gone forever.

Now I have to resign myself to the fact that I'll never see those articles again.

I would have to write them all over again if I really want to publish those articles on my blog.

Needless to say, this was quite disheartening, which was exactly why, even now, I still haven't rewritten those articles.

I decided to just work on other articles for now. One thing was for sure though, I definitely don't want to lose any more drafts even if they were unfinished. It's just too much hassle. So, is there a possible work-around that can prevent this from happening?

Well, since there's no known way of recovering lost drafts, we'll just have to settle for other methods.

For me, what I did was to create another Google Blogger blog, making sure that it was set to private and that no search engine will index it.

In short, this was a blog that only I had access to and was visible only to me.

This particular blog acted as a backup of my blog.

I copy-pasted all the articles in my main blog to this blog.

Every time I made changes to an article on my main blog, I would copy-paste those changes to my backup blog.

In this way, if I ever happen to lose a draft on my main blog, I would never have to worry because I would still have a backup copy of said article.

Dark Hole

Losing a draft is just like having it go pass a Dark Hole because it means you can never get it back. It's gone forever and there's nothing you can do about it, unfortunately.
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5. Organization

Unable to organize blog posts

Google Blogger divides your blog posts into three categories. You have the 'All' category which shows every single article that you have on your blog, whether published or not.

There's the 'Drafts' category which only shows articles that you have yet to publish.

These include posts that you've just started working on as well as posts that you've finished already but have yet to publish.

The last is the 'Published' category, which shows all the articles that you have published on your blog.

For some, these categories may be more than enough.

However, for others, like me, these categories can be quite lacking and aren't exactly what you can call organized, at least not by a long shot anyway. 

What does that mean?

And what could be lacking in the organization of these categories?

Simply put, these categories aren't all that organized because they aren't enough.

Easy Organization

Just like how we want to keep all our things sorted in their proper places, we also want to keep our blog posts properly organized so we can easily find what we're looking for when we need it
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If you're just starting with your blog and you only have a few posts at the moment, it can seem that these 3 categories are more than enough for you and it can seem like there's no organizational problem at all. I thought the same way until I started to write more articles and my blog posts started increasing in number.

Then things started to get a bit confusing and a tad disorganized. This is especially so when it comes to my drafts posts. As I said before, I pre-write my articles so my 'Drafts' category includes articles that I've already finished working on but have yet to publish. These finished drafts mix in with the drafts that I'm working on, which makes it difficult to look for the article that I'm supposed to be working on.

You'll have to remember that you're done with this particular article so you should skip opening that and look at the other draft articles that you have yet to finish.

The lack of organization in Google Blogger blog articles can be akin to a Heavy Storm because everything is pretty messed up and it's hard to find what you're looking for

In contrast to that, sites like HubPages and Wizzley make it quite easy to organize your posts. For example, on Wizzley, you are given many choices as to how you want to organize your posts to make it easier for you to find the ones you're looking for or the ones that you're working on without having to see the articles that you are already finished writing. The same can be said for HubPages.

Conclusion

These are just some of the things that you might dislike about the free Google Blogger blog.

While said blogging platform isn't perfect and has a number of things that might get you annoyed and frustrated, it isn't without its redeeming qualities.

These qualities make Blogger a pretty awesome blogging platform and it is no wonder that there are many who have blogs in said platform.

What else do you like about Google Blogger blogs? What else do you dislike about it?

How many drafts or articles have you lost in your Google Blogger blog?

  Display results
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Updated: 06/30/2016, CeresSchwarz
 
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Comments

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Guest on 04/14/2014

@CeresSchwarz I think the reason why they were considered unnatural links was because they were seen as overly promotional links to websites where both the owner and I could make money and potentially improve rank. I will make future posts to be nofollow links and see whether that helps to convince Google that I am not profiting financially from any of this.

Guest on 04/09/2014

I was served with a DMCA last night on one of the guest posts I had agreed to publish. It was a year old and I guess the author had either forgotten it had been published on my blog or it was scraped and ended up coming my way. That was the final straw. The other 50 guest posts went last night. The rest of the blog (the bits that are mine) is now in Google's delete bin. Nuts to it. I never made any money there (nowhere near the Google payout anyway) and once the Amazon links went I lost that means of money making too. I'll Copyscape it all then start putting it on Bubblews, if it's still relevant. Much of it was to do with my early writing and that's offline at the moment too, so it's probably a good thing.

CeresSchwarz on 04/04/2014

@WordChazer - just because the links no longer work, they would automatically be considered unnatural outbound links? 300 is a lot of posts. I only have less than a hundred on my blog so far. At least those 300 posts of yours don't have to go to waste and you can still make use of them on another site.

@Dustytoes - I've heard a lot of good things about WP but I decided to go with Blogger because it was free. The WP .com may be free but I also heard that you can't use ads there. Ads can be used on the WP .org but it's not free. Yeah, there may be a lot of frustrating things about Blogger but at least it's free to use and it does have a lot of good things about it too.

Guest on 04/03/2014

@Dustytoes funny you should say that. I write guest content for three different WP sites and I have different experiences with all of them. One hates photos, which annoys me as I always want to put one with my blogs. It only accepts them as url links rather than uploaded items. I am really enjoying being free of blogger so far, though, as there are only so many places I can write for without pay. And if it comes to it, I'd rather write here for free because you guys are tops for reading and commenting and reacting on things, whereas with my blog I may as well have been spewing into a black hole for all the reaction I was getting.

dustytoes on 04/01/2014

I find that everything I want to do is way easier on WP than Blogger. Every now and then I go back and try to do something on Blogger and I get frustrated.

Guest on 03/31/2014

@CeresSchwarz I have now taken my blog offline, as I had a snotty email from Google suggesting that there were unnatural outbound links in it. As I have over 300 posts on there, most of which are useless, because they point to articles no longer online, I decided to ditch the lot. Easier than trying to work out which links were unnatural! Bits which are worthwhile are being slowly rolled out elsewhere, as with my previous content for another rev share site.

CeresSchwarz on 03/31/2014

@cmoneyspinner - sorry about what happened to your Google Blogger blog. That's terrible. Is there really nothing that can be done about that in terms of getting your blog back? Isn't there a way to prove you didn't spam? It's sad to think that a blog can simply disappear just because someone flags it for spam and the author can't do anything about it.

I haven't heard of Posterous and blog .com. I'll be sure to check these out sometime. It would be nice if platforms don't just kick off their users unless they have a very good and valid reason to do so.

@WordChazer - I see. My Blogger blog is still pretty new so I'm still working on it even though I still don't have much traffic on it yet. I'm still trying to see if it would work out. It's good that you're doing so well elsewhere.

Guest on 03/19/2014

I'm getting to the stage where if they don't pay or give me readers I won' bother. I have readers here. I get paid elsewhere. On my blog? Neither, so far as I know.

cmoneyspinner on 03/18/2014

When I first started trying to blog many moons ago, the Google Blogger Blog was one of the first platforms I used. One day I woke up and it was gone. "It" meaning my blog. I was told that my blog had been flagged for spam. So from there I've used Posterous, a D.i.Y. blog app that came with the D.i.Y. website builder app that I was / am using, Wordpress, Tumblr and an app I nicknamed “YABA” (like Fred Flintstone's Yabba Dabba Doo!) for Yet Another Blog App – it's called blog.com.

So … I said all that to say this. I don't worry so much about which app has this or that. I just use the platform until they kick me off!! :)

CeresSchwarz on 03/17/2014

@WordChazer - yeah, I read that it used to be so easy to add Amazon links to a Google Blogger blog. But now one has to log on to their Amazon account in order to get the links they want then log on to their Blogger blog in order to paste those links in the appropriate blog post. I'm still writing on my Blogger blog though I'm also trying out Bubblews.

@younghopes - sorry to hear about that. I wonder how that could have happened? Maybe you can search around to find ways to remove the malware? There must be something that can be done to fix this? Hope you can get this problem resolved so you won't have to lock your blog anymore. Good luck.

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