Worth every penny

Blogger is having a rough weekend. Seems Evan current sole supporter and engineer of Blogger, was tinkering to improve performance. Needless to say, a few bugs were introduced. Mayhem ensues.

For most users of Blogger, this means no publishing. Some have encountered lost posts. I am luckily only in the former category. It's been about two days that the problem has been effecting me, with some brief exceptions. It's annoying when this kind of thing happens, but a periodic blogging break isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially when it's a guilt-free one. Can't post, ya see? Blogger's down. Yep. What can ya do? Guess I'll watch some Sopranos.

Of course, I could just write an entry or two into a text file, and put them up when the problem is solved. But where's the fun in that, right?

Lately, I've been thinking about some features I'd love to have for nosuch. With the bit of PHP twiddling I've been doing, there's a temptation to roll my own journaling software. It's not the scope of the engineering work that keeps me from doing it, but my own skepticism at my personal project management. However, when Blogger goes tits up for a day or two, it does make me think about taking matters into my own hands.

I know it would really be trading one set of grief for another set of grief. If I roll my own, I'll have my own bugs to deal with. And my own bugs won't just go away while I watch the Sopranos. I also won't get referals from the Blogger site, which isn't traffic to sneeze at. I also enjoy knowing I'm part of the Blogger "community." If I carve my own journaling tools, I'll feel a bit like a blog-Kaczynski. Hey, there's that kook who went off in a shed an cobbled together his own blog software. What's his problem?

Some reliability problems aside, Blogger is a pretty good tool. The usability for both the author and the visitor is pretty good. It's also very flexible. Seems the people with custom tools frequently suffer from two design limitations. There's the "day on a page" approach. This gets more and more cumbersome the less you visit, which means infrequent visitors are slowly pressured not to come back. It's also downright hostile to a first time visitor who wants to soak up a lot of entries at once. Then there's the sprawling monthly page approach. This isn't as bad, but usually such pages are devoid of anchors or any way to link to a specific entry. It's a type of web-isolationism that discourages outside links. Personally, I want people to link, but that's just me. The monthly pagers also drive me nuts since I can't link to one page to have the most currently entry, because each month it changes, unless I link to the index page and click an extra time. Those extra clicks add up, especially when you have to dismiss a javascript error.

I know it's certainly possible to build or find a tool that functions like Blogger though, without the monthly sprawl or the day on a page thing. There's Greymatter, and a ton of Slashdot-type frameworks, ready to be installed. But none of these give me subtle types of features I'm looking for. It's going to take more than an occasional outage to get my lazy ass out of Blogger.

During the outage, I poked onto the Blogger site just to confirm it was a systemic problem, and not just unlucky old me. Sure enough, from the discussion on the troubleshooting forum, it was clear the problem was hitting lots of people. Lots and lots of angry people. Admittedly, a few had written an entry, and lost it when they posted it. That's happened to me once in a while. It's frustrating to lose your writing.

Mostly people were pissed because they couldn't publish. This had me scratching my head on a couple of counts.

On a technical side, if Blogger lets you save a post, but doesn't publish it, if you have FTP access to your web host, you can update manually. This is true for most people, except for the Blogspot users, which is the free web host Blogger provides. So, excepting Blogspot people, and a few others who might be part of a Blogger team that doesn't have FTP access, the rest of us could work around it. Have so many people gotten that soft and lazy they've forgotten how to tweak HTML themselves?

Even if someone has no technical workaround, nothing is stopping anyone from writing. Apparently people are completely addicted to the immediate satisfaction of writing and publishing in one click. Are they forgetting that you can write in something other than Blogger, and publish it later? I know us blog-writers fantasize that there are legions of people doing nothing but clicking "reload" on our blogs every few minutes, eagerly waiting for us to entertain and amuse them with our amazing authorship skills. The reality is quite different. I would bet most visitors to any given blog may not even notice an outage of 48 hours, especially if the posts are made but published later.

The most amazing thing to me, though, is the vicious sense of entitlement. Blogger is certainly not perfect, but it's pretty damn good. And it's worth the cost of admission, that's for sure. There aren't many things in life that are free and potentially life-transforming, and Blogger/Blogspot qualify in my book. I think Evan's committment to Blogger, bugs and outages included, is damn amazing. Maybe that's because I'm a technical guy, and I can appreciate all the plumbing behind the scenes. A lot of other people, though, fly into a rage the moment their posts can't appear on their site.

In this day and age, I would think people would realize that any site offering a free service online does so without any guarantees. Expecting 24/7 reliability for nothing is just ridiculous. To me, it's not an issue that Blogger has downtime. To me it's amazing that Blogger has so little downtime. Considering how many people use the service, it's quite a feat.

Maybe free sites need warning labels:

Internet General's Warning: The following web site is a free service offered as a courtesy to the Internet community. There are no guarantees about reliability. Use this site at your own risk.

I always thought that was obvious, but I also thought that the concept of inhaling smoke into your lungs was probably a bad idea from a health standpoint was obvious too, and we needed little labels for that.

I suppose it's human nature to only notice the bad things. When there's an outage online of something we enjoy for free, we don't stop and feel thankful for all the times the service works, and for all the enjoyment or utility we have gained. Instead, it's easier to bitch and fume and complain. I think pounding fists on the virtual counter to demand better service is the American way, even when we have no right to demand anything.

For me, I'm just grateful. There are many things I've participated in online that cost me nothing that have enriched my life, and the last thing I want to do is bite the online hand that feeds me these opportunities.
posted 12:37 PM | link |