Archive for the 'Blogger Beta' Category

Date bug

Published on 6 January 2007 in Blogger Beta and bug. 4 Comments

Now that Blogger is out of Beta it does seem to be pretty stable. I do like the fact that as the author of this blog, I no longer have to do any word authentication when I respond to a comment here. It used to peeve me slightly - am I going to spam my own blog?!

Having said that things appear to be working well, I’ve noticed that the date for this year’s posts in the Blog Archive listing down the right hand side of the screen is 2006 instead of 2007. This means I have two listings for 2006, and instead of January 2007 everything I’ve written so far this year is listed as December 2006. Not sure how to fix this - I’ve checked my template and settings but can’t see anywhere I can do any tweaking. I notice that this same problem appears on Feral Library Tales too - it’s slightly reassuring that it’s not just me, I suppose.

No time to investigate further this morning - best finish doing all the last minute things (like the dishes and emptying Baubles the Cat’s litter tray) and get ready to go to Sydney. I’m hoping to get online at least once a day (if only to check email) but I’m not sure how much blogging there’ll be over the next few days.

Out(r)ages

Published on 2 October 2006 in Blogger Beta and Google Reader. 9 Comments

No post this morning because Blogger Beta was down.

You know, I don’t really mind having these Unscheduled Outages. (Or OutRages, as one of my colleagues dubs them.) No, let me rephrase that - outages are always a bit annoying, but Blogger is free, and no one forced me to switch to Blogger Beta, after all.

What really annoys me is the fact that everytime something goes wrong, I have to look around to find out if it’s just my blog, or if it’s a problem with the system itself. And if it’s a problem with the system, having to then work out if the Blogger people know about it and are working on it. (I don’t like to assume anything.) Why can’t they put information on problems (or or any news, for that matter) on the main Blogger page? Or on the Blogger Buzz blog? As well as on the Blogger Status page? (Or make that page more prominent!) And having to trawl through the Blogger help list is time-consuming - and I don’t know about you, but reading about other users’ exact same problems with their blogs and the fact that they don’t know how to fix the problems (or when the problems are going to be fixed) either is not really empowering or helpful to this user. To make a messy situation even messier, each time I’ve needed to find out about problems with the system, I’ve found information in different places (each of the sites I’ve mentioned) - they don’t seem to just use one forum (or better still ALL forums) to let us users know.

Maybe they don’t want to make such information so prominent on their main page because it sends a less-than-positive message to people. I can understand that reluctance, but on the other hand, isn’t it more annoying for people to not have this information? And while you might be trying to minimise the bad news element, the fact that users may be having problems with your service, and then having trouble finding out anything about it - well that’s worse news, In My Humble Opinion. If there’s something simple I need to be doing to keep up with all this - do let me know!

Pbwiki really won points with me when they had a bad outage some weeks ago - they emailed all users so we knew what was going on. Yes, they actually sent us an email. So even if you were peeved about the outage you at least knew what was going on, you knew they knew there was a problem, and you knew they were working on it. You could then go away and do 30 minutes on your exercise bike, or something.

**Sigh**

On another note: I don’t use Google Reader to keep up with my online reading, but apparently the latest upgrade of the service has been good. Like Peta, however, I am a happy Bloglines user, and I do like the recent Bloglines upgrade (I like the auto-refreshing, even if it does make me feel like I will never ever keep up).

I note that it’s possible to display Google Reader feeds in your blog, but I’m not sure I’m game to do try fiddling with this blog’s layout at the moment, given that my last attempt was painful. I note that the Blogger user sharing this information is not using Blogger Beta…

Is this turning into a cautionary tale for all you Blogger users out there who haven’t swapped to Blogger Beta yet?

Blogger Beta Bad

Published on 26 September 2006 in Blogger Beta. 2 Comments

I’ve very peeved with Blogger at the moment. My feed doesn’t seem to have been updating for a few days now (thanks to those who’ve emailed to ask, and I’ve also noticed that Bloglines hasn’t been registering any posts) and I just checked the mailing list to find that apparently this problem has been caused by the fact that Blogger seems to have changed the feed URL.

If you are reading this post by visiting my blog directly you will see a link at the bottom of the page: Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). This feed is the correct feed, but what is really irritating is the fact that my aggregator (Bloglines) isn’t picking this feed up. It detects the old feed, http://flexnib.blogspot.com/atom.xml, but this is no good, as this feed doesn’t work!

Just checked using Sage, and Sage detects the correct feed! Yep, I’m peeved. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could at least tweak the settings and make the correct feed more prominent and auto-detectable, but I can’t seem to, at least, not easily, and I don’t want to spend hours trying to fix it - I have other things to do with my time.

Not happy, Jan!