Fixing the sharing problem

How to fix Facebook showing the wrong text and image when sharing a Blogger post...

Like most bloggers, I share my blog posts on Facebook to attract more readers, and it used to automatically pick up the right image and description. Since I added the Featured Post widget there on the right, things started to go a bit wrong and no matter what I shared, Facebook always used the text and image from the featured post instead of the one that was shared, which was really confusing for my readers. Having spent quite a bit of time researching the problem, it turns out this is a well-known and long-standing issue with the way Blogger works, and various workarounds have been proposed but the one described here definitely solves the problem. It isn't particularly advanced but does require a little use of the Blogger HTML editor.

Ctrl-Z again!

Just a quick one to vent my frustrations. Remember my angry post about the stupid Ctrl-Z behaviour that deletes the entire text of your work-in-progress post? Even though I now know about this there is a further twist that I've just fallen foul of, resulting in the total loss of a piece that had been at the draft stage for several months and was nearing completion - I can't be bothered to rewrite it all so now it will never be published. What happened is that I once again pressed Ctrl-Z too many times and wiped the text, but knowing I would be snookered once the autosave function ran I immediately pressed close to exit without saving and preserve my work. Sure enough, a message popped up saying "You have unsaved changes that will be lost" so I clicked OK expecting my changes to be discarded and the text to be preserved, but no, it appears to have saved anyway and all my hard work was gone with no way to get it back. It seems you can't win and as soon as you make the fatal mistake of pressing Ctrl-Z your work is as good as gone.

I know people have suggested Blogger posts should be drafted outside of Blogger, e.g. in Microsoft Word, so you have a backup copy, but that really shouldn't be necessary and defeats the point of a cloud service that should provide better safety and availability without needing to keep multiple copies. If I thought for one minute it would make any difference I would be writing a strongly-worded complaint to Google, but sadly this is a company that is not immune from the attitude I so deplore of large IT firms not giving a damn about their users and completely ignoring any criticism. I guess I'll just have to train myself not to use Ctrl-Z in Blogger, but that will be difficult as it is a universal shortcut that I use all the time and works correctly everywhere else, and the proper solution is for Google to remove this behaviour. Beware once again - the power of Ctrl-Z is even mightier than I thought!

Beware of Ctrl-Z!

This is not the post I was intending to publish today as that one fell victim to an infuriating feature of Blogger behaviour so I was moved to write about this instead as a warning to others. I have a first-class honours degree in computer science and am currently studying for an MSc in the same subject so I am by no means the average novice user and I feel I am suitably qualified to comment on how stupid and dangerous this feature is, particularly as Blogger is intended to be a simple tool that can be used by people without high levels of computer literacy.

I'm sure everyone knows what Ctrl-Z does: it is a pretty much universal shortcut to undo your most recent change. That's all fine and very useful but Blogger's implementation of Ctrl-Z has another nasty little trick up its sleeve: if you press it again when there are no previous edits in the history, it deletes the entire content of the post to leave you with a blank page. This isn't documented anywhere and the one relevant post I could find dates back to 2011 so it's not a new problem. That's not what an undo function is for so why they have decided to implement this feature and what benefit it has is unclear, but combine it with the automatic saving that is turned on by default and you have a recipe for disaster. For novice users this can doubtless cause blind panic and extreme anger as they think "Oh my God, where did all my work go?!", and possibly drive them to stop blogging as a result.