Google Blogoscoped

Friday, September 3, 2004

BritneyGoogle

OK. BritneyGoogle lets you look at Britney Spears while googling. [Thanks Peter A.]

Female Google

Catherine Parker says Google is a female.

Gmail Invites Moved to Top

If you’re looking for Gmail invitations to send out, note they moved to the top.

FindForward Backlinks Alert Update

[FindForward]

You now need to confirm a subscription check email if you want to receive FindForward Backlink Alerts. (I implemented this for security reasons so that no one may misuse the service to send out spam.) Once confirmed, everything is back to normal. Depending on how things go. I might ask for another confirmation in a year or so.

Blogger.com Broken

I thought now would be a good time as any to talk about a major bug in the Blogger.com software. Major to me – I don’t know how many other people are experiencing it, I only know I experience it using different browsers and different connections.

Basically, I have problems logging in two my “Create Post” and “Edit Posts” screens at Google’s Blogger.com. All I get is endless loading.

What this lack of connection means, effectively, is I can’t blog (unless I edit HTML source via FTP, which I do in rare circumstances). Well, every Application Service Provider – here, a part of the Google OS – is down from time to time, which is nothing to worry (or blog) about. However, I have the same problem with Blogger.com for around half a year.

If there’s one thing I don’t need from blogging software is it getting in the way of me of publishing ideas – after all, this is the most basic need. Even more annoying is when I can’t edit a after it went live, even though I noticed a bug in it (this happened to be the case yesterday, and several times before).
Blogger.com saves me some minutes from publishing using their tool, as opposed to me uploading HTML manually. This advantage is wasted quickly, with every minor delay.

Blogger.com has some not-so-basic needs it does satisfy. Some of them which I never use – like a preview mode in the “Edit Posts” category, which means it will push a dozen complete posts down my browser.

Does this sound like a rant? Fact is, I find it more sad than maddening because Blogger.com is heading in a good direction (they had a great redesign quite recently). Fact is I started to write my own (PHP5/MySQL) blogging software at home. It’s not rocket science to do it for the scale I need it (that is, to run this blog).

I already wrote many parts of this blog from scratch because Blogger.com doesn’t give me what I need; which, for the forum, the title creator, and the calendar, Blogger.com is definitely not to blame – it’s just that I prefer highly integrated tools so you, as reader, won’t see two completely different things to do two closely related things. (Well, for the calendar they are to blame, actually, because around a year ago their archiving functionality skipped days – possibly due to me switching time zones while blogging. That was a time where I paid for Blogger Pro, which is when you don’t expect to script your own add-ons).

Is Blogger.com simply overrun by people using it? If that’s the case, please Google strip down some of your HTML, or get better servers (I’m certain you have thousands already, it’s just that it may not be enough). And if there’s another bug preventing me from being able to publish, repair it, before people may see the need to repair it themselves by switching to other tools.

As for the sweater they send me, I’m still wearing it.

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!