Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

# WebCT Vista grief - Posts : WebCT Vista does a poor job of handling the formatting for posts in the discussion groups:

If I type in a plain-text post:
> Preview shows [br]'s, although they don't show up in the actual post.
> URLs are not converted to links (as they were in CE)
> Clicking on "Use HTML" and adding the necessary HTML code results in the proper links, but the line breaks all disappear, crunching your text together.

If I use the HTML creator (i.e. the Java-based WYSI-sorta-WYG text editor), it works better, but (a) I have to wait for the Java applet to load, (b) I still have to manually create the URLs using the applet's mouse-only formatting tools.

Vista also does away with the "Quote" reply feature, meaning you have to scroll down, find the text you want to reply to, paste it into your reply, and format it so that it looks like a reply.

As far as post editing goes, Vista is a step backwards over waht CE offered. I guess they figure everyone will use the HTML Creator widget.

Ed Bilodeau

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Comments: