Blogger has a new trick.

The old tricks were annoying enough:

* Not allowing more than trivial HTML in blog responses (the least they could do is come up to the bar set by Slashdot, with lists and such).
* The posting Preview doesn't work according to your Blogger posting settings, only the defaults.
* Allowing blog owners to try to force comments into popup windows. (Why not give readers the option of how they want to see comments? Say, with a configuration cookie?)

* The "clear=both" HTML crud they shove into every post, which pushes post text below the sidebar in my template.
* Having no useful responses to bug reports about any of the above.

Now they've got a new one that just appeared today. I tried to log in today to enter a new post, and I was told that my browser was rejecting cookies.

WtF?!?!?!!

I'd had a browser crash the previous day, and wondered if it had left some setting in a funky state. Nope, all cookies from Blogger were being accepted. Problem with previous cookies in an inconsistent state? I deleted them all and still could not log in.

Finally I checked my Javascript settings. I don't allow scripts to do anything with cookies (I don't want scripts doing anything with info in my browser without my say-so). Or rather, I didn't; I found that I was finally able to get into my account after I enabled those things.

Why? It worked perfectly well before. Was it too hard to just leave it alone? Blogger, what kind of thoughtlessless lets you trade your coding convenience off against my data security?

I expect I'll never get an answer to that.

UPDATE: It's surprising how many cookies other sites like Slashdot and Yahoo set when you let Javascript play with them. They seem to work fine without them, so one wonders if the purpose is not to track things that are really none of their business.

UPDATE 19-Aug-2005: Here's a good time to say DAMN BLOGGER. I tried to post a new entry, and it claimed "Blog not found". Then it got worse: the "back" button returned to a BLANK entry, and the recover feature DID NOT WORK! It returned only a partial post, which took half an hour to reconstruct. (Talk about gross incompetence; you can go back in comment entry without losing anything, but not post entry! This is the last time I compose in their text window.)