Authoring things on the web is a constant challenge. The simplest things are hard to make on a good day.

For my mother's pub blog I decided to rely on a solid web technology provider: Google and its acquired Blogger system.
I've been using the option to post blogs on a custom domain (naklar44.com) but suddenly that service broke a couple of months ago. Other people in the same situation complained in the Google support group but to no avail.

The service is certainly free, but people still do pay in a sense: I could have used some other service and give less credit/traffic to Blogger. Also now the previous posts are somewhat trapped with Blogger as the broken part (FTP) is the same that would allow me to export existing posts.

I've used WordPress before and I hated the fact that people can't preview messages before posting (so much work on that package, and no Preview button ?!).
Recently I've been using Drupal, which works nicely as a CMS, but its back-end interface is rather counterintuitive, fragmented and slow.
Drupal offers a great deal of plugins. I tried many of them. Specifically I wanted to have a visual editor for posts and a system to upload images.
At some point I had something working, but visual editors would crap out in a way or another, and uploading images is puzzling at best. There is more than one module, one of the includes multiple modules and it's not sure how it should work. It used to work somehow but now it doesn't work anymore.

Drupal relies heavily on plugins and modules, yet there is no automated system to upgrade them. So one is supposed to constantly go and check for new versions of every single module hoping that something gets fixed but also fearing that something else will break.
Modules are also often sloppy at best. Recently I got this mailhandler module that publishes mails with attachments as blog posts, but it doesn't work for the attachments I send with my cellphone (they are handled properly by GMail). It was also meant for a previous version of Drupal and I actually had to go and create some file to have the current Drupal recognize it... woo !!
On my first attempt, because of a typo on the destination of the content type I actually got a post that would spit an error and that I could not delete !
To fix that I had to edit the Drupal database with phpMyAdmin and fix the post type.. imagine that, a typo in the settings and you are fucked if you can't fiddle with MySQL 8)

Well so back to my mother's blog. I figured, let's try Serendipity (aka s9y). I especially liked the idea that it includes htmlArea directly and that has a system that automatically upgrades plugins without having to manually download, unpack, upload, etc etc.
I install Serenpidity, I check the included themes and then I go to try to make a post. I want to include an image.. imagine that !
The htmlArea editor has a nifty "image" icon. I click on that but it asks for an URL, ehmm, I want to upload the image 8)
I see a "Media" menu on the left side and I find a way to upload an image. On the first attempt I get a PHP error saying that the maximum limit is 16777216 bytes (that's 16 MB) and that it stopped as it was trying to allocate 6730 bytes (or something like that). Well the image is really only 2-3 MB and 6730 bytes is far form being 16MB 8) ...I guess the internal process unpacks the image and that takes more than 16MB, with 6730 bytes being "the last drop".
OK, the error message is dumb at best, but I get the point and I go for a smaller image.
That works, now I go back the htmlArea editor and, with some determination, I find out that the ambiguous-looking icon next to the image icon is the one that will allow me to insert an uploaded image, or even to upload an image in place... great !! Let's include this image !!

I insert the image positioned on the left of the page, then I write some text, then I go to preview and the image is not there anymore.. WTF ??
I try again, this time I write the text first, then I insert the image. The preview seems OK, but the post somehow on a corner on the right of the screen... WTF #2 ?!
And I try again. I go to edit the post, I erase everything, I insert the image again, but now I can't get the cursor on the right of the image to write the post. No matter where I click, either the image or the comment below stays selected and when I write I end up writing into the comment of the image, deleting the image, a complete mess.
OK, I finally realize I have to press arrow down to get the cursor on the right of the image (that's intuitive.. !!). I write the post again and... it's broken. It's sitting again on the right of the page, there is no image, there is no text, only a "->" which I can click on to go to the post which it's finally displayed.. I can see the post's page, but I can't see the excerpt in the main page, how useful.

...I've been using computers since I was 12.. that makes 23 years of using computers. I'm a senior software engineer, I've programmed many things and used all sort of software on all major systems. I daily spend an insane amount of time around computers and Internet. And yet when it comes to web applications I can't find anything that will work right out of the box without any major troubles or limitations.

Doing some searching I found this Blog Post Builder software. I can't use it because I mostly use OS X now, and the software seems limited and possibly not that flexible. But in general I like the idea that one can use proper computer software to edit something that will go on the web.
Nowadays I learned to appreciate using MS Word or PowerPoint, or even OpenOffice.org.. those programs allow you to write and include pictures, something that on the web is still considered a very advanced technology. Sometimes applications are simulated with JavaScript. GMail is based on JavaScript and works great, but most of the stuff out there is hardly user friendly, when it doesn't playing bugs out.

All this technology is still very primitive and to make things worse it often relies on separate chunks like Drupal or s9y trying to use htmlArea ot TinyMCE.. bad bad failed attempts, crapware, Frankenstine bastard systems.

bha !