Blogger Fall Down and Go Boom -- AGAIN
I have received several emails from you, dear readers, wondering where Scientific Life went. Well, it is still here, at least for awhile, but my server, Blogger ("blogspot"), is having a lot of problems these days. Well, these many months, actually. I have been considering leaving Blogger for several months now because these issues have been getting progressively worse, but I haven't found any reasonable (free) alternatives out there. Not only that, but moving means I would break all of my incoming links, which I am incredibly reluctant to do. Besides, who knows if the server that I move to would be any more stable than Blogger is?
Yesterday, Blogger was down for maintenance for many hours longer than it was supposed to be, during peak traffic hours, but unfortunately, this so-called maintenance did not appear to solve anything. Scientific Life still disappears from time to time (hitting reload often recalls it, though), and Blogger is still eating reader comments (which makes me sad), and it still is very inconsistent about publishing anything that I write. There were five days recently where I could not publish anything at all, in fact. Further, another reader informs me that my RSS feed is screwed up, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, although I am willing to bet that this is also a Blogger-related issue, grr!
In addition to all those problems, my blog download speed has become .. well, downright slow. This is due to a combination of factors, beginning with Blogger, but made worse because I link to lots of graphics as well as a fair number of bells and whistles on my sideboard (look to the left and you shall see my collection). As one person told me recently, Scientific Life has outgrown Blogger. Well, I am not sure if that is true because it is still a baby blog (although I would like to believe it is growing up), but something has got to change, and soon.
I guess this is a prime example of how I get what I pay for -- and less.
© 2004, 2005, 2006 by GrrlScientist
posted by GrrlScientist at
21:11
6 Peer Reviews:
Blogger does tend to wig out on occasion, and its latest eccentricity is giving me 403 "Forbidden" errors when I try to visit blogger web sites (including my own). I just hit reload and it works the second time around for some reason.
You don't have to lose all your posts if you switch to Wordpress. Take a look at www.wordpress.com. I'm only just starting to use it, but I like it.
Blogger had been working fine for me up until the outage earlier this week, and then I started having problems with lost posts again. (Sometimes I have to hit reload while posting to make it go all the way through.) If I can keep the blog running for more than a year I might consider a different service.
By the way, your RSS feed works well for me. The one key I found was to use the RSS (2.0) and not the Atom (0.3) or RSS (1.0).
Since switching to cable, Blogger has been working fine for me. They have certainly made many improvements over time - it cannot compare to the hell of a year ago.
I did have problems over the weekend, and many blogspot blogs I had to reload/refresh in order to see them. I am still sticking with it, for some of the same reasons you noted - it's free, etc.
Yes, blogspot is often frustrating, but sometimes I try to imagine what it must be like to host all of our blogs for free. Imagine having to provide support for those servers, and all the uploading and photos that move mostly effortly through the ethers. That makes me very grateful, and actually sympathetic to their problems. It is frustrating, but what about computers isn't?
I love Blogger for so many reasons and yes, I agree that it was much much worse a year ago. But because it is free and because it nearly always works fine, I never complained much about it.
But now, it appears that I will be moving my blog to a new server soon, for reasons that are not connected to Blogger or its issues. I will give you more details as soon as I have them, and that should occur within the next week. The relocation will occur shortly, too. Perhaps by Christmas. But don't worry, this blog will remain here and will serve as my archives as long as Blogger will keep it.
GrrlScientist
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