03.26.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:26 am by George Smith
Today marks my official parting with the old Blogger version of this page. The posts from it won’t go away. But it will become the equivalent of a petrified tree.
Google Blogger will turn off FTP-publishing on May 1, perhaps sooner.
I started with the application in 2006. It seemed like a good idea for about a year and half. However, Blogger’s FTP publishing became progressively shakier and fragile.
As annoying as it was to me — as seen here – Blogger employees eventually copped to it being equally annoying to them. At which point they decided to pull the plug.
The migration to WordPress in the last month was easy. But Google Blogger’s decision put a hit on readers, as everyone who was using FTP finds out.
Favors don’t come easy, if they come at all, on the web. And you’re always under threat of being obsoleted or upgraded out of existence.
Blog readers, I’ve found, are a bit like cats. They’re not fond of changes in scenery and location. Adding a new address to ‘favorites’ or even something as simple as reading the new URL for a different page inside the domain is often a bridge too far.
In any case, by 2009 the old blog had brought in well over a quarter of a million readers. Not bad for an mix of national security, music and personal idiosyncracy postings.
For example, this completely whimsical post on Joan Jett is still serendipitously one of the old blog’s highest downloads.
It’s always neck-and-neck with Peroxide Bomb, Easy to Make.
Two distinct audiences there: One which loves rock and roll, many of them girls. And one which is into homemade bombs from the war on terror, all guys. The alpha to omega with quite a bit in between.
The old page — here — now has a permanent redirect which brings you here in five ticks. I may stretch it out a bit at a later date depending on various statistics.
Therefore, if you haven’t done so already and you are here from the redirect, reset your reading habits. Or we can agree to part, too.
The pro is that now that I’m used to not logging into Blogger, I don’t miss it. The application never figured out how to make my block quotes look good.
Old fun with Blogger.
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02.02.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:02 pm by George Smith
Upon news of Blogger’s abandonment of FTP-publishing, it seems logical to see if the old WordPress can be dusted off an reused to better effect.
See here for the original news on the Blogger-apped part of the site.
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05.02.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:06 pm by George Smith
Google’s Blogger application and its infrastructure continues to fail on a regular basis. Coming into the weekend, FTP publishing collapsed, as well as commenting.
In all likelihood, this post will only publish to the mirror, which is here, if you’re reading it.
One of the reasons for this mirror is to migrate from the old blog (the one you’re used to reading, to this — on WordPress — in a different directory on DD dot com) is the regular failure of Blogger’s FTP publishing infrastructure. It is now so obvious a problem to users, one might call it a feature. (See here and here, for example.)
This adds to the April problem of Google Blogger’s overzealous spam robots regularly classifying blogs which aren’t spam as spam blogs. (See here.)
And this does not include the failure of Blogger’s syndication feeds a couple weeks earlier, one in which the application was corrupting atom and rss feeds worldwide and replacing them with 0-byte files.
Or the time, when FTP publishing failed previously for DD this year when the application simply blew away the index root file of the old blog, necessitating a restoration from snapshot backup.
These problems are not isolated. They happen to Blogger’s users worldwide, particularly if they’re using FTP publishing to deliver their blogs from Google’s servers to wherever they are hosting, usually on a small business site or an institution. And they largely go unaddressed UNTIL hundreds of people start posting in Google’s ‘Help’ forums. At which point, wheels start to slowly turn, and something gets a little fixing without anyone actually explaining much about what was wrong. And then the punters stop whining. That is, until next week’s similar failure.
One might think this would occasionally be read of in the news media. After all, Blogger is a fairly widespread and socially well-entrenched application. But no, most reporters won’t deal with Google because it has become so big no one can talk to it.
Instead, Google tells them what for. It tells them they need to shut up and find new jobs because Google is going to take their news and spread it globally for free until they no longer exist, which will be soon. So all the good little journalists on the business and tech beats at the dailies spend their time extolling Twitter and how everyone ought to use it right away or their lives will crumble into ruin.
Hey! Maybe Google could be persuaded to take Twitter over and give it that unique Blogger touch. Then everyone would really have some fun.
Update: Blogger eventually took enough ragging over the FTP issue that one of the milksop computer business websites did a story on the subject
here.
However, if you read through the short piece, the reporter never really gets around to putting the Blogger rep’s feet in the fire. For the record, it’s Rick Klau.
Since the FTP problem had been so obvious, Blogger did manage a rare apology.
“Let’s start with the most important comment on this state of affairs: this sucks, and we’re sorry,” said Klau.
However, Klau also furnished the standard response Blogger has delivered during the last few years whenever there’s an FTP publishing screw up.
It’s the private domain user’s fault. And it’s his or her fault because the hosting service is always changing its FTP logon protocols, flummoxing poor Blogger.
However, anyone who has used FTP through Blogger during the past couple of years knows this song and dance is the stock reply, one delivered even after the user has run down every detail on their hosting end and determined that nothing has changed.
In another way of speaking, it’s Google Blogger’s standard excuse. And they stick to it rigidly until complaints in the help forum get so loud they’re forced to quietly fix what is cocked up on their side. When the momentary trouble with FTP abates, they go back to whistling the same tune.
It’s one of the primary reasons I abandoned Blogger. Couldn’t stand the technical faults and excuses insinuating it was always the user’s fault. If you want to use your domain to host a blog, you should not go down the road with Blogger drawing your carriage.
Related:
Another way of describing various Google apps and their general approach to failure and crack-up:
Google’s introverted population certainly knows that it’s easier and cheaper to legalese your way out of a customer’s problem than it is to hire a person to pick up the phone.
From here.
Updated
Here. Haw!
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