Bag o' Burning Blogger

I'd been hearing rumblings around the blogosphere about my fellow bloggers having difficulties with Blogger, but so far, my difficulties had been minimal, probably owing to my whacked-out (read: frequently past midnight) posting schedule. But yesterday was horrid! I now understand, on a visceral level, why such heavyweights as the Belmont Club left. Closer to home, Martin Lindeskog has at least considered the possibility with dread at the implied prospect of having to change his URL. That post, dated March 18, quotes Blogger Status as saying,

Users with more than 500 posts are also being severely hampered at this time. We believe this is due to an improper use of system resources when users of such blogs either access the Edit Posts page or attempt to publish. We will be testing a potential fix to this problem over the next couple days and hope to push it to production early next week. Because of the extent of the change, we need to fully assess the impact on the service before deployment.

If anything, I've noticed a degradation in service since then. I was about to complain that it has been more than a weeks since that last post, but I checked Blogger Status just now and found a possible explanation for the agony I experienced last night in lieu of the ecstasy of a good blogging session: They made a bad kernel upgrade and are now in the process of rolling it back. If this is true, then they will be going back to the earlier operating system kernel that they obviously felt the need to upgrade! Yes, they have more servers now, but my confidence is quite understandably shaky at the moment.

So last night, I actually got home before 8:00 pm! The wife was hard at work on her dissertation, so I decided to make lemonade out of that lemon: "Wow!" I thought. "I have five hours to edit a post, maybe write another, and work on my blog template!" What actually happened in that five hours?

1. The post I thought I'd saved was gone. It took me at least ten login attempts to learn this sad truth.
2. In no mood to rewrite that one over a phone modem, I chose a quicker topic to write about. This time, I used my Mozilla editor (which I'm doing now) so that Blogger couldn't eat it, too.
3. After some outrageous number of logins and internal server errors, I finally got the post up. Twice. A third version was saved as a draft. This took at least 30 minutes to fix.
4. I got to remove the remodeling message from my template. I tried a few other edits, but these were going nowhere and it was already closing in on midnight.
5. I set a new record for Blogger logins!

Five hours, and the most noticeable long-term effect for me is that my wrists hurt a little, I have the lesser of two blog entries posted that I wrote, and my template is barely passable. For reasons I am keeping close to the vest, I will have an influx of new readers soon. Hopefully, the content will keep them coming back, 'cause the template probably won't exactly be eye candy by then.

So here's my gripe about Blogger right now. This is my hobby. I love to write. I like the fact that I have a chance to get intelligent feedback from my small, but loyal band of regular readers. I have even made a handful of new friends doing this. This has been a rewarding hobby, but Blogger managed to turn this delightful pastime into a penance last night. After that experience, I woke up hating my blog this morning and resenting having lost nearly a quarter of a day of my life (and a fun five hours it was supposed to have been).

Like Lindeskog, I'd rather stay put at this web address, but I won't if I come to dread every attempt to publish or make a small change to a template, or answer comments. He wants to throw eggs at Blogger. He's a lot nicer than I am. About now, I feel like touring the corporate offices of Google, or whoever else owns them and stopping at each office door with a little surprise.

Each occupant will hear a knock. He'll answer the door. And he'll be stamping out a burning bag of Blogger to the tune of the sounds of me running off!

Well. I feel better now. But then, I still have to publish.

And that's my long way of saying, "I might take the rest of this evening off from Blogger." I may write something, but if I do, it may save it for posting in the morn.

-- CAV

PS (aka Blogger User Testimonial, an abbreviation that happens to spell the conjunction most commonly used after praising Blogger's performance): I'm on Blogger now. Login and "new post" went quickly. The spellchecker has failed four times. I will try once more before just reading it. Make that five. Great. No spell-checker in this editor. And something is whacked about cut-and paste from there, so I can't use Star Office for that. Don't have the time or patience to figure out why. I'll just read the damned thing. Oh! Sixth time's the charm! Well, that's probably all the luck I'm going to have. No preview. Just .. publish ... after ... pasting .. into ... Mozilla's ... editor.

C'mon, Blogger guys! Customers who go through this don't remain customers for long. Please fix this. I want to stay.

3-30-05 - (1) Blogger is quite zippy today. This is quite nice. I hope it lasts! (2) Yes. Blogger is monetarily free. But since the owners either make money from it or hope to, the question becomes, "Why do they go through all the trouble of hosting the service at all?" Because they attract viewers and hence advertisers through the free content we bloggers provide. While we don't pay in money, a trade is going on. So my beef is completely legitimate. (In case anyone out there was starting to wonder whether I was some whining socialist idiot savant who has "writing hard-hitting Objectivist commentary" as his "splinter skill.")

Updates

3-30-05: Corrected a bunch of typos and added two more PS notes.