Wired has a piece on the recent appalling state of Blogger:
What’s up with Blogger, the institution that is eponymous with the media phenomenon it helped spawn?
Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog to catch up on the latest gossip, meme, political diatribe or cybersnark, you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content. Since Blogger, which is owned and operated by that sleek geek machine, Google, is a lot like a public utility, when it goes down, so do the lights on a large swatch of the blogosphere.
The result: a lot of irate netizens.
“This has been the worst week of blogging since I started,” complained Digby, who ruminates on politics. “Blogger has been constantly bloggered and when it wasn’t, my cable has been offline. Since last Tuesday, I’ve barely been able to read Atrios, for gawds sake, much less post one of my own brilliant observances. I hate blogging in coffee shops. I just hate it. But I’m here and if I don’t keel over from caffeine poisoning before Blogger eats my post, I’ll hopefully have something brilliant up soon. Or not.”
I myself can personally attest to this. This blog itself was first hosted on Blogger, but after a while the service just became too unreliable. What I also don’t like are the lack of features (no technorati keywords and no pictures in the feeds to name too).
Don’t get me wrong, blogger has also done a lot of things right. The back end interface is superb and the template system is very powerful. It’s just the reliability that sucks. This CAN be helped. Blogger, please be swift and fix these problems. Otherwise someone else will and you’ll be left in the dust….
Hey, I’ve got Technorati tags on my Blogger blog, plus Trackback, permalink, the lot. And all free. You just need to tweak the template a little and know where to go. And I’ve had no trouble posting to Blogger with my 2Mb broadband. To prove it try here.
Yeah, but the thing is that these are all external services that have to be installed. It’s cool if you want everything for free, but these days you get decent php/mysql hosting for $5 a month. Install wordpress and you get the above and much much more.
It’s been a while since I’ve used blogger, but the reason I moved were the horrid reliability problems it had then. Even exporting all my articles (about 150) to a new template didn’t go well until I did it for the 20th time.
Where once blogger was king it’s falling fast. Don’t get me wrong. I like blogger. I hope it succeeds. I hope they fix the problems quickly. I have faith that they will. Blogger is a powerful tool that lets clueless novices use a good blogging program, without having to understand how to install/maintain it.
I take your point. But WordPress is not an easy program to use, and getting a domain name/hosting is such trouble. I was glad to get away from all that when blogs took over from static sites. Yours does look good though.
Thanks for the compliment
. But I would have to disagree with you on using wordpress.
The installation is easy as pie (just ftp it and set the directory permissions), and with the latest versions layout & php code are seperated.
Also the back end is made much more slicker & easier to use with the following greasemonkey script.
While blogspot is good for the novice I highly reccomend wordpress for the more seasoned blogger.
Thanks for the info, Al.