Google’s blogger.com brings a great deal of value to the table for its users. Blogger is free, allows for rapid account creation, is easy to learn, provides you with a human-friendly URL, creates visually appealing results easily, and is fairly customizable. It makes user creation of content fantastically idiot proof. Could I do all of this in HTML and CSS? Sure. Would I? Heck no, I love how easy it is to update with this software.

I do however, have a few suggestions on how to improve it. These are merely suggestions for improvement, and not failings, so don’t think I don’t love Blogger. Heck… you are on my blogger website after all!

1. Make the writing space bigger.

I need to perform a great deal of unnecessary scrolling when I write posts longer than two paragraphs or so. Unfortunately this applies even more frustratingly with pictures taller in height than the window that you are given to work within. I know that the window space is designed for to fit on the screens of who have “typical” low resolution monitors, but there has to be a way to allow me to either pop out the workspace and adjust it, or simply choose to make the workspace longer within the normal blogger “create” tab. I need more work real estate, this is not cutting it!

2. Make it easier to upload multiple images.

It is repetitive and annoying to add multiple images to posts within blogger, and it really doesn’t need to be s. Blogger could just allow people to add multiple images all at once, and then give them the ability to move these images to their final place once they are added. Think… Gmail attachments, where you have a couple of lines to fill in, before you go through all the preview generation and such for Blogger. There are of course more sophisticated ways you could do this, but I am not sure of the coding limitations, so lets leave that to the programmers.

3. Make it easier to use multiple accounts.

Many people, including me, have different accounts for different facets of their life. Work, play, hobbies, etc. Because the Internet is public domain, its good sometimes to segment parts of your lifestyle. Do you really want people searching for your birdwatching blog and finding your posts on a forum asking for dating tips? Nah, that’s why blogger should allow you to switch between accounts more easily, or have multiple accounts open on the same machine.

4. Make the interface more like using a program, and less like using a website.

Web pages are really wonderful for providing information, but really annoying to use for advanced content creation. I know why Google / Blogger want to provide their stuff via the web… because they are standard cross platform protocols. That’s fine, but if you are going to put everything on the web, stop thinking like web designers, and start thinking like productivity software / game designers. Make the interface more fluid, customizable, and powerful. No more hitting the wrong button and loosing all of your data! Sure drafts help with that… but still.

5. More variation in looks.

Sure blogger allows you to create a great looking website quickly and easily, but this great look that you end up with is too similar to many, many, many, many other blogs out there. It makes my blog, and other people’s blogs look cheap. I wish that the tools for customizing your template were more powerful, and that there were more templates already provided by Google. Eventually I will create my own template, but there is a huge jump in knowledge necessary to create one that few users will want bother with.

6. Fix the wrapping issue in Opera.

I don’t know if this is Google’s responsibility or Opera’s, but it drives me nuts. I use Opera as my main browser because its fast and I love the power user commands and interface functions it provides. One of the few issues I have with the software, is when I use blogger. As I write in the given space, sometimes when I get to the end of a line, rather than wrapping down to the next line, instead it keeps going farther and farther to the right of the screen. Even when posted the text does not wrap. This creates a major problem because not only would people have to scroll to see what I write, with most templates it simply gets covered up or hidden completely. The only way to fix this for now, is for me to make all of my posts in Firefox… which is silly. I don’t know who dropped the ball here, but it needs to be fixed.

These are the issues that came up for me today while using my other blogs, so I decided to post them up. If you have your own suggestions, please leave them in the comments, and I will address them on here for you