Frustration

Do you ever get frustrated by the inability to make your tools do what you want them to do? I do with some degree of regularity. Although I have spent a great part of my life developing software and programs, every once in a while I run into a program or tool that just will not do or let me do what I want it to do. (Or at the bare minimum will not let me do it the way I want to.)

In such a situation, I am left with few choices. I can create a new tool that does the task or behaves in the way I want it to. I can decide the niggling problem isn't worth any additional effort and let it go. I can spend hours beating my head against the monitor and keyboard trying different possible work-arounds. I can search using Google and the filtering skills of my inner frustrated librarian and hope to find a solution.

I have done most of those things attempting to get blogger to expand the comments on the main page like it does if you click on the the title of an article. Obviously, I could modify the underlying xml/html, but that defeats the goal of staying within the standard constraints of using blogger and not needing to do technical maintenance with each change by the blogger developers. I know what I desire is possible because I read various sites that do precisely what I desire. Most of them seem not to be blogspot and blogger based. Some examples include "The Spohrs are Multiplying ... ", "Cosmic Variance ", "The Observation Deck ", or even "Scribbit " which doesn't show the entry form but does expand the comments and is blogspot based.

I could understand not doing the expansion on a very popular site or one that drew many comments on each post. To misquote a former teacher, "That is not a problem with which I suffer." So I'll leave it at this: if you are using blogger and have succeeded in doing what I so desire without heavy modifications to your template, could you please point me in the correct direction? I am perfectly willing to limit the main page to just one post rather than the current weeks worth of posts at once if that is a needed change. Thanks.