Blogger.com sucks.

Yes, I know, the key to happiness is low expectations, therefore, I should be happy with the low quality of Blogger. And for the most part, up until, oh… say, two years ago, I have been moderately happy. Then, in a push to make things ‘better’ the Bloggerati geek crew went and screwed up the way pictures are posted. Now, in order to post a picture in a blog, I have to shrink it down to nearly postage stamp size. Makes those painstakingly crafted photos (yeah… right…) blurry and hard to make out.

And there are other issues with Blogger, but whatever… it doesn’t matter. (Yes, Blogger.com has received an ubiquitous GFY award, even emailed it to Blogger.com headquarters. Didn’t help one bit. They still suck. Didn’t get me kicked off either, but it didn’t help.)

In the past two years, I have increased my daily readership so that now when I say there is a Faithful Fifteen following, it’s not technically a lie anymore. On any given day, an average of fifteen honest-to-goodness insomniacs stumble onto the Rant to get their fill of yawn-inspiring drivel.

And to think it only took me four years and five hundred ninety posts to accumulate this following! Thanks to all of you that have made this monumental achievement possible!

Well, Faithful Fifteen, I’ve been trying now for about two months to get a divorce from Blogger. There are blogs out there, real ones by real bloggers that, quite frankly, are good. Both good as in ‘with real content‘ and ‘with a layout that doesn’t blow.’ Now that I have officially passed the almost insurmountable fifteen reader a day hurdle, I want to have one of those blogs with a layout that doesn’t blow too.

Fear not, Faithful ones. Except for my planned use of a spellchecker, the content of the new blog will not be new and improved at all. Frenchysrant.com, if and when it ever materializes, will still be of it’s same silly, mediocre quality. Wouldn’t want to upset the tangerine cart and lose any of the readers I worked so hard to get, now would I?

Knowing more about string theory than I do about website design, about two months ago I started calling and emailing real companies that do this kind of thing for a living, asking for help setting up a non-blowing blog site. Most never bothered to respond at all, and though a few did respond, saying they could absolutely help, they soon stopped responding too. Not one website design firm I contacted made it past that initial email exchange.

Who knew this seemingly simple process would be so difficult?

So, with all that said, I’ll throw it out there to all fifteen of you. I am currently looking for a website designer to help Frenchy’s Rant relocate. My requirements are pretty simple; put together a WordPress-based blog site that showcases my crappy pictures and crappy writing in an easy-to-navigate, non-crappy, non-sucky way. If anyone knows of a person or company that knows how to do this kind of thing, and also knows what the ‘Reply’ button does, drop me a line at frenchys-rant@att.net

Author: frenchy