Why This Site Has Moved: Blogger Turned to Crap

Blogger, which has slowly turned to crap.

On August 24, 2005 I created the Crappy Software blog to chronicle all the malfeasance in the world of software. I happily ran it on Blogger software running on one of my own Web servers. Then, in 2010 Google—which had bought Blogger in 2003—decreed that all Blogger blogs must run on blogspot.com.

I didn't like entrusting control of my data to Google/Blogger, but I complied and moved Crappy Software and a couple other blogs over there. There were a few bumps in the transition, but I was basically satisfied with Blogger even as I began to use WordPress for more and more of my blogging and basic Website design needs. It's gotten to the point now that whenever I need a quick-n-dirty Website, I slap together a WordPress installation in, like, 20 minutes.

Until...

Until the day (and I don't even know exactly when) when Blogger decided to delete all of the images I'd uploaded between 2010 (when I moved to blogspot.com) and 2014. Dozens of images were suddenly missing. I still don't know exactly why beyond some sort of weird clusterfuck among Blogger, Google+, and Picasa (and PicasaWeb). You see, Blogger, unbeknownst to me, was storing my new, uploaded images in PicasaWeb. Best I can guess, there was some shift in my Google account—perhaps when I activated Google plus—that disconnected Crappy Software from its PicasaWeb album.

I spent an hour or so yesterday trying to figure out exactly how it happened—following leads suggested here—but I was not able to track down Blogger's crap move.

So, Good-Bye Blogger

And so that motivates me to bid adieu to Blogger. WordPress is a superior blogging platform. Why stick with Blogger when it's going to do crappy stuff like this?

Many of my images are permanently lost, best I can tell. I still had all my pre-2010 images, from back when Blogger was good software. And several of the post-2010 images were still on my hard drive. It's taken me the better part of the day to move all the text and re-upload images, but I think I'm going to be happier with WordPress as Crappy Software's new home.

Hello, Crappy.Software

In related news, I've taken advantage of the new top-level domain names (TLDs) and nabbed crappy.software for this blog. Ain't that cool?

So, please correct any link or bookmarks to point to crappy.software for future rants about the crappiness of software.

Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Are Just as Crappy as I Remember

About four years ago, the University of Alabama, where I work, decided to "improve" the email experience for faculty and students alike. This was long overdue as the email product it had been using was truly horrible with an utterly useless Web interface that was here branded as "Bama Mail."

UA students were all moved onto the Gmail platform. I should say, I am a huge fan of Gmail, which I have used since invitation-only, beta accounts were made available back in 2004. Its Web interface is extremely functional (its keyboard shortcuts have entered my muscle memory) and its spam filtering is second to none. Having used email since the days of BITnet and dumb terminals (tapping into UA's Big Iron at UA1VM) and having suffered through monstrosities such as cc:Mail (shudder), I feel like I've reached email Nirvana with Gmail.

Consequently, I have been forwarding my Bama Mail to Gmail for the past ten years and I have set up Gmail's "Send mail as" feature to "use Gmail to send from [my] other email addresses." As you can imagine, I would have been quite happy to have my UA email ported over to the Gmail platform.

But that was not to be for UA's faculty and staff. Instead, our accounts were moved from Bama Mail to Microsoft Exchange Server and we were instructed to begin using MS Outlook as an email client.

When I heard the news about the move, I think I might have physically winced.

I consider myself something of an email pioneer. Hell, I've been running a LISTSERV email list for over 23 years. Over the years, I've sampled many email interfaces and client software--from the egregious cc:Mail (still probably the worst) to the sweet Eudora (named for author Eudora Welty!) and the yes-we're-still-here Mozilla Thunderbird. I've even run my own email server (Mercury, we miss you!). In that time, I've heard many horror stories about how difficult it is to keep a MS Exchange server from borking everyone's email. And I've personally experimented with MS Outlook and found it to be clunky and bloated.

Thus, even when UA moved us to Exchange/Outlook, I continued to forward my email to Gmail. But within the past year, an official policy came down: No forwarding allowed! All faculty/staff must use Outlook and all email must be stored on UA's Exchange servers.

I sighed. Why weren't faculty/staff moved to Gmail like the students? I speculated about the reasoning behind the Exchange/Outlook move for faculty/staff (speculation I'm not going to air here) and recommended the UA Faculty Senate push back against the move, but to no avail. And so last week, I gave in to the inevitable, cut the forwarding to Gmail and began using MS Outlook--its desktop client and its Web interface. Besides, I thought, I haven't used Outlook in many years; maybe it's improved.

Improved? Yes (it would be hard for it to get worse). Still crappy software? Absolutely. Allow me to enumerate some of the ways in which it remains pure crap:

1. Its Web interface is optimized to work best with Microsoft Explorer (the world's worst Web browser) and it eliminates features from its interface if you try to use, say, Google's Chrome.
2. Even thought it's optimized for MS IE, it still crashes IE on a regular basis. In the week I've been using IE and Outlook Web Access (OWA), it has crashed at least ten times. (See below.)
3. Its spam filtering is anemic. 
4. Its "rule" system is less powerful than Gmail's "filters."
5. Its folder system does not allow you to tag one message with more than one folder--as Gmail's archives do.
6. Its desktop client (I'll call it Outlook Desktop Client or ODC) is difficult to configure. Setting up ODC on my home computer was impossible without a call to the UA help desk.
7. I am still trying to figure out OWA's and ODC's addressing and address book. Can one not insert email addresses into a message with the standard "firstname lastname " format? Does an email recipient have to be in OWA/ODC's address book first? If so, that is big-time crap.
8. On other email apps, like Gmail, when you begin typing into an address field, the app will try to guess who you're sending it to and fill it out for you. ODC does this, but it only does it for addresses I've previously emailed. It does not seem to be pulling potential email addresses from the contacts I uploaded into the address book.
9. I'm sure part of the rationale for using Exchange is to get UA faculty/staff to rely on its calendar. Sorry, but I won't. I'm quite happy with Google Calendar and I have dozens of repeating appointments (birthdays and such) that I am not going to try importing into Exchange calendar. Again I ask, with students using the Gmail platform, why aren't faculty/staff?
10. When you install an Exchange account on an Android device, you get a very scary warning message ("Activate device administrator?") about erasing all  your data. I suspect this is as much Android's fault as Microsoft's, but, still, I don't remember getting this when I installed other email apps. 
    

I Just KNEW Adobe's Creative Cloud Subscription Model Was Going to Be Crap...

...and now they're proving me right.

I hated Adobe's new plan of charging an extortion subscription fee for Creative "Cloud" when it was first announced. I finally and very reluctantly gave in to it when they reduced the annual fee to an absurdly low level for college professors like myself.

But now Adobe has shown me why this approach is so dangerous for consumers.

A few weeks ago, CC automatically updated Dreamweaver, a crucial piece of software for me--software that I use virtually everyday. And in updating to DW 2014.1 they disabled a key part of the program--its "design view." Now, you are forced to use "live view" (although only when editing fluid-grid layouts).

The problem for me is that live view is extremely clunky and slow and absolutely does not fit into my workflow. And I depend on design view for all sorts of things--including very quick edits to Web pages.

The loss of design view makes Dreamweaver unusable for me. I've been a Dreamweaver support for many years, but if they don't fix this, I'm going to have to find a alternative.